When age is but a litany of loss,
your life reduced to sorting through the dross
of past achievements,
when the age is grim,
the time is to become a piligrim.
Pligrim-age, a chance to re-assess
priorities, to re-address the mess
of habits and regrets and to redress
the wounds inflicted on yourself and others
by you and mothers, fathers, sisters, brothers –
the loved and hated ones,
the ones who form you
and whom you shape.
The people who will mourn you
day in and out,
as you live and breathe
they mourn who you were and what is.
What might have been…
one can but disappoint
while one is living.
Death creates a point
of no return,
no future and no past.
No possibility of loss at last.
Woebegon – for woe to be gone
we stop the clock at death and then move on.
Obituaries are but tales that bend
realities into the shape of stories
including start, the middle and the end
that banishes not sadness, but the worries
and when the last uncertainty is gone
piligrimage is finished.
Life is done.
