Mary Hobson

For Neil. 11 February, 2011

I thought the man I loved had died.
We’d married, not three years before,
in nineteen-fifty-four.
Then headaches, pain,
the abscess on the brain.
I count the cost,
discover what he’s lost,
and take this stranger home with me.
But just a few
short months before his death,
quite suddenly
he was the man I knew again.
He let our children see
the man I loved, the man they never knew.
While I sat by his side
and nurses hovered anxiously above him,
with his last breath
he let the children love him.