I first met S when I was teaching a week-long community holiday workshop in poetry. She contacted me beforehand to see if it would be okay for her as someone who had written criticism but no poetry before. And there was another guy, a very accomplished and astute Japanese professor who wanted some time writing poetry in English.

So in the weeks leading up to the workshop I was terrified. It was going to be a small class but I felt so inadequate to teach them anything. Then a week or two beforehand my stepmum had a stroke-like episode and went into a kind of coma, we thought she would die, and not for the first time. I drove up north to help look after my dad. He was getting around in a daze. The dogs were not house-trained. My dad was opening bills for the business for the first time ever and finding that everything was on final notice. Nothing added up. At the hospital my sister sat by the bedside wondering what the fuck to do. To change my step-mum's catheter or sheets required multiple nursing staff, sometimes up to six at a time just to roll her onto her side. There was no way of scanning her or knowing what was going on or if she would ever recover. The nurses would argue with frustration over how to even move her.

I was so scared for my dad, and angry with him too. Why wasn't everything okay? How could I possibly begin to look after him? I bossed him around a bit, ineffectually, over the days of my stay, and then I had to go.

Out of the fear and wrongness of it all I found myself determined to teach a beautiful class, to make something good, a place for poetry. I told myself I would not be afraid of their learning, I would not try to dominate by teaching, I would just facilitate, and learn. We began by reciting Drunken Boat together, listening to each other's voices. I tried to get them to think of creating and editing as separate, just for a time. I asked them to bring poems they loved each day and I did the same. Rilke's Eighth Duino Elego, Denise Levertov's Pleasures. The Japanese guy brought Robert Duncan. I'm not sure who S brought, I don't remember. Some Ted Hughes, I think. But I remember S's own poems, having a weird sense of resonance with them, because the aesthetic felt so close to somewhere I had been. She was writing about her oldest child and there was a profound sense of haunting. And a desolation that I recognised, a specifically maternal, ecological desolation. I never thought to ask her where that came from because it seemed SO familiar.

Afterwards we would meet up occasionally, every two or three months, to share poems. Warm as they were there was also something a little bit stiff about those meetings, even though we liked each other very much. I felt sure of my aesthetic opinions but never felt a justified authority for them, so I was a bit defensive. I think we were both guarding our aesthetics. And we didn't break through our mutual reserve to talk about things more personal than poetry, though that was personal enough.

It shifted when she got sick. Suddenly I could see what she was, the friendship that had been building, what I could lose. The trust, her grace and equanimity. I wanted to be there for her and I didn't want to lose her. I remember seeing her at the hospital for the first time after I got back from London, and she was so open. I remember her telling me stuff and then saying yes, I just had a feeling you'd understand that. And so we became confidantes. It turned out we were walking some quite similar, quite treacherous terrain on a couple of things. So we walked in parallel on those things for the next five years, sharing stuff that was unshareable most other places. Slowly both got to safer ground, calling once every few weeks to talk through pretty much everything.

But our journeys were at different orders of magnitude. I was a good friend to her and I am glad of that. Meanwhile she was incredible, making life itself out of sheer love and positive will.
I wonder now what I will be able to take of that, what I can take in and make my own.