Once I'd found it, I was reminded of "Fever", by Eavan Boland: a meditation on mortality, the silences that so often stitch together the seams of our lives, & the personal histories lost in those silences...

Fever Eavan Boland

An Origin Like Water: Collected Poems, 1967-1987 New York:  W. W. Norton & Co., 1996

is what remained or what they thought
remained after the ague and the sweats
were over and the shock of wild flowers
at the bedside had been taken away;

is what they tried to shake out of
the crush and dimple of cotton,
the shy dust of a bridal skirt;
is what they beat, lashed , hurt like

flesh as if it were a lack of virtue
in a young girl sobbing her heart out
in a small town for having been seen
kissing by the river; is what they burned

alive in their own back gardens
as if it were a witch and not the full-
length winter gabardine and breathed again
when the fires went out in charred dew.

My grandmother died in a fever ward,
younger than I am and far from
the sweet chills of a Louth spring -
its sprigged light and its wild flowers -

with five orphan daughters to her name.
Names, shadows, visitations, hints
and a half-sense of the half-life remain.
And nothing else, nothing more unless

I re-construct the soaked-through midnights;
vigils; the histories I never leaned
to predict the lyric of; and re-construct
risk; as if silence could become rage,

as if what we lost is a contagion
that breaks out in what cannot be
shaken out from words or beaten out
from meaning and survives to weaken

what is given, what is certain
and burns away everything but this
exact moment of delirium when
someone cries out someone's name.