Part of the oddity of ‘virtual’ acquaintance is that it may bond people over thousands of miles although they never meet in the material world.
This modern truism hit home most hard yesterday when news of the untimely passing of an acquaintance’s brother in his late forties won her an outpouring of quite affecting sympathy from many people who would otherwise be wholly unaware of each other’s existence.
A poem that encapsulates the grief caused by the death of a beloved sibling especially well is Mid-Term Break by the late Irish Nobel laureate, Seamus Heaney. The difference though, as my newly bereaved friend would surely acknowledge, is that Heaney’s brother died aged only four.
“Mid-Term Break
“I sat all morning in the college sick bay
Counting bells knelling classes to a close.
At two o'clock our neighbours drove me home.“In the porch I met my father crying--
He had always taken funerals in his stride--
And Big Jim Evans saying it was a hard blow.“The baby cooed and laughed and rocked the pram
When I came in, and I was embarrassed
By old men standing up to shake my hand“And tell me they were 'sorry for my trouble,'
Whispers informed strangers I was the eldest,
Away at school, as my mother held my hand“In hers and coughed out angry tearless sighs.
At ten o'clock the ambulance arrived
With the corpse, stanched and bandaged by the nurses.“Next morning I went up into the room. Snowdrops
And candles soothed the bedside; I saw him
For the first time in six weeks. Paler now,“Wearing a poppy bruise on his left temple,
He lay in the four foot box as in his cot.
No gaudy scars, the bumper knocked him clear.“A four foot box, a foot for every year”.
© Natalie Wood (20 May 2014)
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