The Pathologist's Report

A wife bids her husband a final goodbye.

"This is the body of a tall, fit, strongly built young man.”
 
Lying here on the slab, stitched from the navel to the chaps,
they’ve done your hair all wrong.
I’ll pull it back down your forehead, cover the two deep gouges
parallel as tracks cutting into your gorgeous face.
Wouldn’t want you to look uncool.
Your nose, I see is patched together with skin-coloured filler.
No in or out breath at all?  Can’t put that together.
 
O the pity of it.
 
Apart from the abrasions on your beautiful hands
and the wreckage of your face, you are dead perfect.
Not a broken bone, only the one
around your neck, your twenty-first present, I see it’s split in two.
 
Your cock lolls to one side as I pull back the sheet to
check that it is really you, not some changeling they’ve swapped.
You are starting to smell of embalming fluid, drowned in it
so I’m still not sure. You were always so shower-fresh.
I’m stealing now from the dead, taking your wedding ring away,
freshly cut, to give to our son when his tiny hands turn
to man’s hands. Right now they wave in the air, clutching at nothing.
Both of us are sucking our fists at night, it stops my screaming.

This numb thing is not you surely?
 
Don’t fret, your son is sleeping, looked after by our friend
while I am down here in the morgue looking at you, for you.
You seemed to have slipped by me, whistled off to climb I suppose.
What do I tell him when he’s old enough to understand?

I need to lay my palm on his warm baby cheek, lean over him
and check his faint breath for life and catch my breath with love
when his eyes open and he recognises me and smiles.
 
You do know, he’ll never be old enough. 
I’m going home now betraying you by leaving. 
Now you know how it feels.

It’s cold here and you won’t speak to me.
Lie there then, with your eyes shut against me.
Mine stare at the dark all night, dry and open,
hearing you trip and fall, seeing you
silently, desperately grasping at crumbling rock after rock.
They all let you down.
 
I really am going now. You’ll be sorry you
let us go. Alright then, one cool kiss and
I’ll be off.

"Traumatic haemorrhages of the brain are confirmed.”

Photo by Rachel Stewart –info@rachstewartphotography.com

Sue Heggie has written poetry intermittently during a professional life in education in Aotearoa (New Zealand), but has been inspired to write more often since joining 26.

The Pathologist’s Report won the prestigious Takahe Poetry Award but has not been previously published. It draws on Sue's personal experience of her husband Brett dying in a freak accident when his crampon broke while climbing the challenging Mount Sefton in New Zealand’s South Island. He had been the full-time carer of their 22-month-old son while Sue worked as a Deputy Principal. They were married for just a few weeks. Their son is now 32 and is to be married in early April. 

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