THE LIVING ABANDON THE DEAD

 For their own sake,

or so they tell themselves,

the living abandon the dead.

Yes, they will remember them,

even after time has brought years

between their last meeting,

yet they will shie away from the facts

of death, the moments of pain

and desperation, when then the still living

loved one faced their end in fear.

The living abandon the dead,

and turn away from contemplating

those long moments of confusion

and utter helplessness,

when the mind fights to comprehend

and, with the body, tries to survive.

If the dead would indeed have but survived,

the now living could, with them, face

those moments as a shared experience;

but when the loved ones stopped breathing,

when their hearts stopped beating,

when their brains were starved of oxygen

& all their decades of memories,

their very being,

ceased to exist,

then a chasm opened

between those who, until then,

had been connected through

the entire life of the now solitary living.

It's a chasm that could be faced, if not crossed,

a chasm in which the living could gaze & see

the true price of being alive, to be paid at the end,

could see their own folly, shame and guilt,

and their own inevitable passing

from existence to oblivion.

Yet, the living turn away

from the dead in betrayal,

in anguished mix of guilt & grief,

as others in the flow of time will turn away -

as they themselves know -

from the yet unopened

chasms that shall come to divide

their own last moments

from the continuing lives of those,

with whom they still share

this plane of precarious existence.

For their own cowardly sake

the living abandon the dead,

refuse to acknowledge the sheer horror

of the all-engulfing death,

as only madness

could protect the brave

from all-shattering sorrow.

Yet there would be

freedom of honesty

in embracing the madness

as a price of love &

having been loved.

For this unforgivable,

essentially human, betrayal

which they pass onwards,

no one else shall fully face

the magnitude of their own coming end

after it has devoured them.

The living shall abandon us all

before the all-ending death.

06.03.2021