I knew Emma best at the beginning and towards the end of her life. As for all of us, my memory of knowing her is unique.

For me it was a strange mix of sometimes feeling like some kind of non-theological god-parent; other times a strange and challenging straddling of her world and Richard’s world.

More than anything she made a friend of the part of me that knew mental illness – or maybe it’s more an impossibly special “hyper awareness” of the soul…

When I was ill / becoming ill/ emerging from illness, forty years or more ago, I used to write poetry. This website has made me write something again – something to share about how I knew Emma and what her finishing her life means to me.

Love,
Love always.

Graham

That’s my first memory of you –
A wee tot in a corridor cot;
Your tiny gasps life critical:
Asthma stifled, even then
as silently we urged on your defiant little tummy
Pumping for breath like a bellows

You knew:
The world’s not quite our stage
Your true unbounded soul’s becoming
Penny-pinched and bruised
By cash nexus realities
Relentlessly forging their cruel bargain
With the true poetry and drama of your own dear life

Emma amazing –
Your thoughts shimmered
on the wind
Like butterfly wings of shining silk
While you
Brought down to earth again
Said “I am the ugly insect”

Emma amazing =
Your mind rippled with taut ambiguity
Complex with beauty
You flew the brave banners of your thoughts
Into the stiff winds of public skies
While you felt sometimes like
A rotten flagpole

Once you told me
Your body felt so alien for you sometimes
Like a vehicle you didn’t want to be in
and couldn’t drive

and this time
I think you felt the road ahead
was narrowing,
Crushingly,
Too fast,

and you decided, you decided
to jump out now

That you
like all your friends behind
must cope now
your life to be complete

so everyone would suffer less
….and even you

Emma
Thought-soaring, lovely, tattered pure and lovely
Brilliant, battered, radiant fragile smiling
Darling Emma

When you took your special self to that final edge
and
Pushed
I hope you flew
Emma
I hope you flew