Post-reproduction life: the moving finger

There's a special kind of hell reserved for immigrants when the last remaining parent dies on the red earth of motherland: the winding up of the estate.

As if, in the long and arduous immigration process we haven't had to deal with enough bureaucracy and form filling, now complex legal requests reach out across geographic and cultural barriers with an 8 or 10 hour time difference adding distortion to the mix. Being woken by 3 in the morning phone calls from awkward para legals on another continent. Yes. Right. Has anyone ever shown you a world map? Do you understand latitude and longitude, time and space?

No. Me neither.

And then of course there are the wisps of comment which find their way across the waters. The neighbour wondering to a sister sotto voce whether we know that the paintings hanging on my mother's walls at the time when she died were originals.

Well, did Nosy Neighbour really think we grew up ignorant of the authenticity of our heritage?

And all this long-distance authentication of my pedigree now, what the value in a land of plastic disposable dreams where the blood has run thin and cold, with no longer a voice or vein to connect?

And then, and then all is changed in an instant. Weeding unloved books from the shelves in the library, an old faded sticky note falls out. Anonymous hand, apposite message.

The Moving Finger writes; and, having writ,

Moves on: nor all your Piety nor Wit

Shall lure it back to cancel half a Line,

Nor all your Tears wash out a Word of it.