In Memoriam

Rose Cannon 1920 – 2016

Yesterday I saw my little, blue-eyed aunt, still lovely after almost a century, go, so quietly, so willingly, into the good night, or the good light, she might already have been aboard a reed boat, afloat on a morning river. Fill up the room, she had told her friend, and in that sun-filled room, with her big, mechanised chair, her stuffed bookcase, and little else, her friends came and went all day. They held her hands, stroked her forehead, chatted softly, and, at the end, said prayers she had learned as a small girl in Donegal. When I put my hand on her arm I felt only bone. Over the last months she had become a reed herself and spoke the word ‘love’ more often, with less embarrassment, than anyone I have known.

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