Yesterday, I judged the Camden Schools poetry competition alongside the wonderful Kim Trusty and Roger Robinson.  The kids wrote all sorts, the best being those who wrote what they needed to - just like the rest of us. Today, Kim ran the Race For Life for Milly, among others. She sent me this photo. This evening I was looking for a notebook and came across this poem I wrote the day after she died. I am coming to learn that grief never eases, though it visits less frequently ...

When we first met, you were eating doughnuts
Your face upturned, your smile jam-sticky
It’s tricky to know
If this is actually my memory
Cinefilm or photograph -
More likely a collective effort by your family
That loves you

As a child you were all smiles and stares
Smiles or stares
Either way disarming -
Alarmingly, I married a woman exactly like you in that way

Do you remember the clothes, the haircuts, the crushes?
Good and bad
Yours and mine

I can still picture you on points in Benjamin Britten’s cataclysm -
Ballet in Guildford cathedral -
You, the raven
My Asian sister
Who’s now left our ark
Our Mazda
Our Morris Marina

Do you remember the day I passed my driving test
When I picked you up from school
And crashed into a Rolls?
I always felt I had to protect you
That was my role
Fortunate for us both I never had to

How many times have you picked me up, Milly Neate?
How many ways have you held my hand and told me everything would be ok?

Once, on my birthday, we went to the pub
We sat side by side and swapped jokes
A friend of a friend said –
‘Who was that girl sitting next to you?
‘It’s strange, but you look exactly alike’ -
Family is not about genes

Yesterday, as your body lay upstairs in your bedroom
I thought about our last visit
She and me
Champagne to mark our marriage -
You and he taught us about
Chocolate dessert from a packet, too rich
And the wealth of joy found simply in each other
Uncontained

Yesterday, he told me that he was sitting in a tree
When you died
He felt a gust of wind
He thought it was your spirit flying away -
I believe that

Yesterday, we drove home together in the Mazda
The five of us
Our little family now fits in one saloon car
And nothing could be less fitting
And nothing will quite fit again

When I think of you, Milly Neate,
I will think of the raven
Who flew the ark -

One day
We will see beyond the rising tears
To the horizon
Take a deep breath of fresh air
And not think of death
But life elsewhere –
One day
We all must leave this ark
And we won't fly
But disembark with sea legs shaking
One by one -
Until then I live in hope
That I will find you waiting