Missed

Missed

"Do you miss your husband?" they ask.
She smiles at the wall;
who on earth would have painted it such a vile colour?
But she misses many things,
continence, a walk in the park and her own teabags.
I smile back.

"Do you miss Dad?" she says.
He nods sleepily.
He is missing hair and some teeth:
virility is still in the balance.
But he turns in hope at her touch.
I've been there.

"Do you miss Grandad?"
She peers warily through a curtain of dyed hair.
This must be a trick question,
it doesn't involve boyfriends, drugs or revision.
"Sometimes," she mumbles.
It must have been the right answer; the interrogation ceases.
I fade a little more.

"Who's this old git, and what's them on his face?"
"That was your great-grandfather
and those are called glasses;
he used to write poems and stories
in the wild frontier days of the Internet."
"Is he on the syllabus then?"
"I doubt it very much, he never got published."
No need to read me.
I am deleted.