Please do not come to my funeral,
you who abandoned me
when I needed you most.
Why come?
I will be far gone
into a place
where all debts are cancelled,
all old hurts unremembered.
I will know the answers to questions
I have been afraid to ask myself
all my life.
Perhaps you will even weep.
For what?
For the lost, last years of my life
when things finally began to make a kind of sense
I'd have loved to be able to share with you.
But I fear it might be for that broken idol,
that unrealisable dream of the father/lover/friend I never could have been,
a perfect companion,
denied the duty of getting it right
by first getting it wrong.
I never pretended to be that person,
nor will I now.
The body you will come to bury
crumbled to dust long ago,
if indeed it ever was.
But the drunk who frighted you
is still there within my brain,
and I must confront him on a daily basis.
I know I have let you down.
All I asked for was a hand to hold
as I entered the most dangerous places
I have ever been in my life.
Did you think, perhaps,
a big man should be grown too old to cry?
Oh, those “should”s!
They have afflicted me all of my life.
It is hard enough getting through each day,
putting one foot before the other
and trying to remember how to enjoy
the sun and the stars
and summer rain upon my face.
I have been climbing, climbing,
and my breath no longer comes
as free as once it did.
Each peak revealed
new mountain tops ahead.
But at last
I can stand on the brink
of a new kind of uncertainty
where tomorrow and yesterday
have lost their meaning.
I can link hands
with all who have gone before
and hold out to you who follow,
forgetting who we were
and what was done
and what should not have been.
Only what is,
and was, if we had but known it,
and ever shall be.
So come then after all,
if you will,
or not.
It is all one.
As all are one.
And sing one last sad song for me.
Happily.
01-7-27, Dead Sea, Jordan
