Awake - a poem by Tom Vaughan

                         Awake

                         At our age, it's more funerals than weddings -
                         both equally good for catching up on gossip
                         although now more usually about whose suffering
                         from what than who's sleeping with whom  - whose hip
                         joint is ceramic, or whose by-passed heart
                         pumps as well as the one they were gifted at the start
                         Then the big C-word - the strange one-upmanship
                         of comparing which particular body part

                         is caught in that disease's pincer grip
                         and calculating the chances of survival.
                         We note when memory begins to slip -
                         a first sign of Alzheimer's?  The removal
                         chapter by chapter of the storied self,
                         a death before a second death, by stealth.
                         Yet there's always the occasional daredevil
                         boozing and smoking, and still in robust health....

                         But courage should mean a brutally frank appraisal:
                         life's just an actuarial calculation
                         and there's only one direction for our travel -
                         towards, surely, complete annihilation.
                         It's strange that such farewells are called a wake
                         When friends go out forever, and daybreak
                         won't bring them back, or herald their salvation,
                         or comfort those who loved them, for whose sake

                        we offer words we all pretend can ease the ache.


                                                                                                    _  Tom Vaughan

                       
                             Overheard:
                        Two friends both in their late eighties, leaving a similar aged friend's burial.
                       "It's hardly worthwhile Tom, us going home, is it?"