With small, bare feet, I creep silently along the cold linoleum of the passage. I shiver a little in the early morning chill. There is a shadowy hush over the sleeping household. I pass quickly by my parents' bedroom doorway, and glimpse briefly my mother's sleeping form. Her face, turned towards me, is pale, and she I still fully dressed on top of the bed clothes. I hurry to the very end of the long passage way and stop at my grandfather's closed door.

I wonder why it should be closed, for the past week it has remained always, day and night. I can hear faintly, from the dining room, the slow ticking of the great clock. The distant, measured sounds make the surrounding silence a palpable thing, and I can feel the heavy thudding of my own heart. I stand, hesitantly, shivering in my thin nightdress, and a curious breathless fear makes a painful lump in my throat. I strain my ears to hear a sound from behind the door. There is nothing. Yesterday and for many days, there has been the harsh and laboured sound of his breathing, sometimes faint and shallow, at other times painfully load, but always there.

I open the door quietly, and walk a few paces into the room. Relief floods through me as I see that everything seems exactly the same. His long, white motionless shape lies in the bed just as it has every morning. The pale and wintry sunlight falls golden and mellow into the room. A minuscule universe of tiny dust motes move in slow eddies beneath the window, and outside, the apple tree, old, grey and decaying, taps gently with one gnarled and twisted branch against the panes. The ashes in the grate are softly grey and cold, and some are scattered across the hearth. My mother's knitting lies in a sad, blue heap in the fireside armchair and an empty tea cup sits in an unmatched saucer beside the hearth.

I still cannot hear even the faintest sounds of his breathing, and as I move across to the bedside, thin and icy fingers take a hold around my heart. I stop near the bed close by his shoulder. my arms hang strangely heavy at my sides and I don’t have the strength to raise them. I can't immediately bring myself to look down at his face, and instead I look across the room at the wall of shelves, letting my eyes run over the rows of his books. The familiar beauty of the tooled leather bindings, the slim volumes of poetry and the faded and ancient spines of his most precious works, stand as orderly and as dust free as always; somehow they reassure me. His old magnifying glass with the worn tortoiseshell handle rests in its usual place upon his table uner the window.

I look down now at his gaunt and beautiful old face, so intricately lined and marked by the hands of time, with eighty years of love and laughter and pain. His eyes are closed and sunken into deep, bruised-like shadows beneath the bony, white ridges of his fine brow. I put up my hand to touch him, then let it fall again. I am aware of a dull, constricting ache in my chest and I can't breathe easily anymore. The gently scratching twig of the apple tree at the window is suddenly a sinister and beckoning black claw. The thin strands of his hair, once so shining and silver white, creep across the pillow like an old grey cobweb. His skin is yellow, stretched tautly across the prominent, proud nose and high cheek bones, to fall into loose crepe-like folds about his mouth and neck. His mouth is open slightly, the lips made shapeless by many tiny, blood-filled cracks.

Beneath the white cover his body seems shrunken and brittle and I have the strange feeling that if I were to touch him, it might crumble and disintegrate into dry, yellow powder, like the pages of an old, old book. His arms have been placed neatly by his sides and the coverlet smoothed about him.

I walk across to the window and press my face against the cold, damp glass. I can see out over the great, rambling garden. His garden. It is overgrown and wild, not from neglect but because he liked it that way. The bushes and trees grow strongly and profusely, entwined, entangled, falling over the worn stones of the surrounding wall. Woody creepers and vines hungrily climb the sides of the house and writhe about the trunks of the trees. Narrow paths meander in an aimless, happy fashion by clumps of honeysuckle and wisteria and wandering jew, and strawberry plants sprawl in beautiful, sweet disorder about the ground.

As I press against the glass, in my pain, and through a mistiness made by my own breath, I see him again, down there, working in his garden. He has on his black, battered gardening hat with the wide brim, and his collarless, old man's shirt is rolled up to the elbows. He is resting for a moment upon his spade, one hand behind him to ease his aching back. His forearms are brown and knotty and his faded, blue eyes, gazing out over his trees, are gentle and peaceful.

My tears come slowly, and I can no longer see out of the window, but I know that he will always be down there, in his old garden, and not lying so still and dead in the bed behind me.