The following is a poem to honour the love my uncle Pa Malone has for his partner , Annie, my Aunt who sadly passed away.

The church is hot.
The smell of cut grass
Flows through the open doors.
Inside, the heat has drawn something sweet
from the mahogany pews.
That is what I remember.
And the quiet, broken now and then
by a cough, a child being shushed,
shoes scraping the floor,
the pews creaking when somebody moves.
There are no seats left.
My feet hurt.
I stand at the back, shifting my weight
from leg to leg, thinking
I should have worn better shoes.
A stupid thing to think
at my someones funeral,
but feet hurt even when someone has died.
The body has no manners.
The church is full.
Every pew is taken,
people standing along the walls.
All these bodies
because one is missing.
Then my uncle stands.
His son goes with him.
They walk to the altar together
and stand there,
their shoulders almost touching,
carrying the same absence
in different places.
One has lost his mother.
One has lost the woman with whom
he built the ordinary architecture of a life.
Father and son,
grieving her from different shores
of the same dark water.
From the back I observe enough: the stopping, the looking down,
the breath taken
where no breath should need taking,
a smile arriving
at some small memory
and leaving almost as quickly.
He speaks of his wife.
Annie, My aunt.
And I understand
these are not the same loss.
He knew the place beside her in bed,
the sound of her moving through the house,
how she took her tea,
those little irritations that become precious
when nobody is left to irritate you.
I am family,
but I am standing
at the edge of his grief.
And, God forgive me,
I find it beautiful.
Outside, the flowers are in full bloom.
Trees are heavy with leaves.
The day is warm enough
to draw sweetness from wood.
Everything is alive,
and still
his winter has come.
Trees know this.
They bud, they leaf, they flower,
and when winter comes
they let everything fall.
We know this too.
We plant gardens knowing frost exists.
No tree has ever promised
it could keep its leaves.
Perhaps love deserves
the same honesty.
Perhaps beneath every I love you there should be the quiet knowledge:
one of us will Carry.
One of us will be carried.
And still, we should bloom.
Because watching him there,
with summer pressing through the church doors,
I understand grief is not
what happened to their love.
It is what survived it.
And perhaps more than that.
Grief is every I love you
we felt no need to say,
every kiss given without noticing,
every ordinary morning we believed
would be followed by another.
All that love,
small enough to live quietly
while two people shared a life,
suddenly has nowhere to go.
So it grows.
It pushes roots through memory,
breaks open all the places
we thought we had sealed,
reaches towards whatever light remains
and blooms into something
larger than it ever needed to be
when the person we loved
was still there to receive it.
And I envy him.
Not the coffin.
Not the empty place at home.
Not the morning that will come
without her.
I envy a love
that can make an absence
this enormous. A love with roots
so deep in another life
that death can fell the tree
but it cannot pull it from the earth.
A river loving stone
long enough to carve it.
The sea returning again and again
to the same shore.
The light of a dead star
still travelling through darkness
towards someone
who just might look up.
Perhaps that is grief:
love continuing
after the body
that received it is gone.
And there he is,
an ordinary man ,
his son beside him,
and there I am at the back,
my feet forgotten,
envying the beauty of his pain.
Because what a thing it is
to have loved someone
enough to hurt like this.
What a thing it is
to have been loved
enough to leave this much behind.
God, don't we all
we all deserve
a love like that.
A love worth the winter.
So if frost comes for my love,
let me remember this summer day:
sweet mahogany, cut grass through open doors,
a church filled
by one woman's absence,
a man at an altar
showing me what remains
when love loses its target.
Let me not curse the falling leaves.
Let me have loved enough to know
they only fall
because once,
they bloomed.