A Good Place To Die
Thoughts and a poem
I wrote the following poem, A Good Place To Die, as yet another way to try to attack my extreme fear of death. In my thoughts after the poem I have linked here, Of The World’s End, I wrote about how I can’t even talk about death or see old people on TV without having a panic attack:
Several therapists and psychiatrists have tried to help me and I still have a ball of anxiety rising in my throat just typing these words. Ugh, I’m going to really have to push through just to be able to finish these brief thoughts about the poem I’ve written.
Certain places on Earth are so wonderful they don’t even seem real. They become permanent parts of our life stories and seem like something from a dream. Could it be that places like this are so special that they are “good places to die,” as the old man says in the following poem? That might be a comforting thought.
Also, humans are capable of artful thoughts, of dreaming, of philosophy. If we raise ourselves to these more magical planes when it comes to our end times, maybe we can rid ourselves of fear. I hope. That anxiety from a couple of paragraphs ago has spread from my throat to my stomach now. Time for the poem.
A Good Place To Die
The old man and the boy
had rowed for days
when they came upon
the empty village
by the sea.
From the beach
they saw temples
on the hillsides
made of stone.
“A good place to die,”
said the man — but
the boy was young
and innocent and
he didn’t know
how to speak.
In their new house,
the old man had
time to teach him
but the boy didn’t
care to learn words
from a dying man.
For a week they watched
the birds in the sky
and the moon
trailing on the sea,
and the boy brought
the man fish to eat
and water to drink.
On the seventh day
the old man dreamed
that a woman was leading
him home to a house
she had built for him.
It was night but fireflies
lit the darkness.
In the dream they sang
a song only he could hear.
A sign from the gods,
he thought as he walked
behind the woman.
He did not look at her
and she did not look at him.
