Life is busy, not just for me, but for everyone in the world it seems. Yesterday, I flew out of the office, still on the phone and punching emails out while I was in the cab. I needed to go and have my eyes checked. Like everything about me, my eyes have a quirk, one of them has never learnt to see properly and the other one sees so perfectly that “my affliction” was only picked up when I went for my learners licence when I was 17 years old. By then my brain had learnt how to see my way and apparently could not be changed. More recently, I have just acquired an added difficulty, in that my arms have become too short and I need glasses to read. So a complex check needs to take place to make sure I protect my vision as I toddle off into my middle years.

I arrived at the Eye Specialist and walked into reception, I duly filled in the forms and was told to go into a room next door to wait my turn. I wandered into the room and it was filled with people. I felt mildly irritated as I thought, “this is going to take long.” Then I noticed something different. It is not often that I am the youngest person in the room these days, but I was the youngest by far. There were about ten people in the room and they were all about 80. The room was quiet, but for a man who I later learned was 89, who was holding court in a sonorous English accent. He was an actor and he was speaking about his wife, whom he had lost 15 years ago when she was 64. She had been a well known actor in the TV soapie Neighbours. He was telling stories about their life in the theatre. His rheumy eyes were filled with nostalgia as he regaled how much he loved her and how while he still missed her, he spoke to her all the time and knew she was with him. As each person got up to be seen to and left the room, he shuffled up and took the vacated seat next to someone else and asked “Would you like to see her picture? She was beautiful.” People obliged and stories continued. It struck me how lovely being old really is, in some ways. You are allowed to do and say more or you have got to the point where you don’t care what people think. Just like very young children, the older people in our society, seem less inhibited and as a result the waiting room became a chatty, convivial place, rather than one where we were all paging through our magazines, silently harrumphing that it was taking too long to be seen to.

Part of my procedure meant that I had to have drops in my eyes to dilate my pupils so that the doctor could look into the back of my eyes to check that everything was functioning well. This meant a check first and then another wait in another room while the drops took effect. Once again, the actor and I were back in the same room. This time I heard stories of him being a navigator for the pilots in the war. He was really inspiring. Again we went our separate ways.

The drops meant that my vision would be affected for about two hours, so my daughter came to pick me up, as I could not drive myself home. I had told her to just come in when she got there and wait in reception. As I came out of my last check, she was alone sitting next to the actor, and they were chatting away happily, her face glowing as she grinned at me (my distance vision was fine, but everything close up was a blur). I paid and she said her goodbyes. As we walked out she said “Mum, I loved that man, he told me how he had just met his great grandchild and that she had been named after a baby who, his daughter had lost many years ago to a cot death and the family wanted to keep the name going and recognise and remember that baby, who was no longer with them.” It struck me then how everybody who had chatted to him had been changed by the experience, we chatted about him for a long time, he made us speak of love, of courage, bravery and loss. It was so much better than crazily flipping through a magazine. We should all take a leaf out of old people and tiny kiddies books, we are spiritual beings having a human experience and our aim is connection. It is how we grow. Finding the courage and time to connect needs to be conscious if we want to bring texture to our lives, rather than life being a boring waiting room!

© Tanya @ Ordinary Poetry

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My dad was well known for translating Italian idioms or thoughts directly into English. It used to make us laugh and sometimes shake our heads. He also had no problem speaking of his impending death. This started when I was about six. He was always very healthy, but if he got a cold or any minor ailment he would call my mother and in a croaky voice, say “Bring the kids.” We would have to sit on his bed and he would get teary eyed and say “You know your father loved you.” Initially this would make me fearful, as a teenager I used to get frustrated and later in life it was a quirk of his that made me smile. I knew he really did love us. In more recent years, he no longer needed an illness to speak of his impending death. Even though he was fairly healthy, every time I saw him or occasionally on the phone when I spoke to him, he would say “When I die, I leave the feather behind.” As I explored this concept with him, it seemed to boil down to his belief that his body would remain, but his spirit would move onto its next journey. Sometimes he said it so often we would joke and say “leave many dad, we will make a pillow.” We would joke, but we all dreaded the day that he really would leave the feather behind. This December I had the blessing of spending quite a bit of time with him. On many days, he told me that he was not long for this planet. Even though he was not sick, he was starting to get tired and of course, he added that when he died, he would leave the feather behind. The last time I hugged him and said goodbye, we both avoided the question of when I would see him again. I thought it would be for his eightieth birthday, in April this year. But I did not tell him that as I wanted to surprise him closer to the time. I had no idea that three days after landing back in Australia, I would be boarding another flight to Johannesburg to help my sister and my mother organise his funeral.

My mother fielded tribes of beloved friends and family and my sister and I ran around organising the funeral and administration. In between tears and laughter, we often mentioned that he had gone and “left the feather behind.” We planned his funeral, chose music (see link below) to walk into the church behind his coffin, wrote eulogies that all of us wanted to get up and say, including the grandchildren, who chose to speak, we hung the three oil paintings that my daughter had done of my dad as part of a school project in the church and we cried and tried to also celebrate his life and his big character and personality.

When the funeral was over, we followed the coffin out of the church and down the steps. As we walked outside, I looked down as I guided my mother down the steps and lying on the top step was one perfect white feather, with a small edge of grey. It was the most perfect feather, it looked brand new, not a feather that would have fallen out without a purpose. I bent down and picked it up.

My dad had left the feather behind.

© Tanya @ Ordinary Poetry

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