AS MY COUSIN Joan Moran lay dying in a hospital bed in Calgary, Alberta in the summer of the year 2001, I would sometimes fly from Toronto, where I’d moved the year before, to sit by her bedside. If she was well enough, we’d tell each other jokes and stories as we’d done ever since we were small girls, and we would remember the good old days when we were teenagers and mad over Elvis Presley.
When she came up from Lucea, Hanover to spend summer holidays with us in Kingston, my cousin Joan and I would always go to Saturday afternoon matinees at the Carib Theatre, and our joy would be complete if there happened to be an Elvis Presley movie showing, like Jailhouse Rock or Blue Hawaii or King Creole. We bought magazines like Photoplay that carried stories about Elvis, his life in the army, his marriage to Priscilla, and we’d sing along to his songs when they came on the radio. When Joan went back to Lucea we would write to each other, and she once wrote me a letter that described how she had been swooning over an Elvis Presley song playing on the radio when our Aunt Cleodine, who was a stern model of Victorian propriety, declared, ‘I am sick and tired of your stupid giggling behaviour over this man Willess Bessley!’
My one consolation is that I now laugh at that joke with my cousin Myrna, Joan’s sister, who looked after Joan in the last days of her life with amazing loving kindness and tender mercies, while at the same time she was taking care of her mother, my beloved Aunt Ann who died, maybe of a broken heart, a year after losing Joan who was her youngest child. I just want to put on record here that Myrna is a kind of saint.
My visits with Joan in the hospital are now all a blur and I still tear up at the thought that I won’t see my beautiful cousin ever again on this earth.
When she wasn’t up to chatting and making jokes I’d sit by Joan’s bed and read out loud to her, sometimes from the Book of Common Prayer – my mother’s people are big on The Book of Common Prayer – perhaps even more so than the Bible, except for the psalms. Number 139 which begins, ‘O Lord, thou hast searched me, and known me,’ was Joan’s psalm of choice.
But my cousin also liked me to read poetry, especially the poetry of John Keats, and one of the things she willed to me was her book of Keats’s poems and letters with her notes in the margins. In her elegant handwriting, in dark green ink, on a narrow strip of light green notepaper she wrote:
Keats is the Romantic poet who looks outward –
to grasp the true reality of the human situation.
He is the most detached of the poets –
he sees the importance of the distanced perspective.
Negative capability – the ability to step outside himself.
One of Joan’s very favourite John Keats poems was ‘What the Thrush Said’:
O Thou, whose only book has been the light
Of supreme darkness which thou feddest on
Night after night when Phoebus was away,
To thee the Spring shall be a triple morn.
O fret not after knowledge—I have none,
And yet my song comes native with the warmth…
‘We are from Jamaica, we are natives with the warmth,’ my cousin and I would joke; and I’d say, ‘[I] Fret not after knowledge, for I have none.’ And after that she would sometimes just fall asleep smiling.