My father always told me
his father always told him
that my father’s grandfather
died just like my father’s father:
rolled over in bed, sat up,
probably sat there a minute
thinking about the weather or
whatever it was that lay ahead,
reached down for his slippers,
groaned slightly, keeled over,
face-first onto the hardwood,
gone. Both of them, gone
in the lack of a heartbeat, gone
forever, before they got old,
regardless of what “old” was,
way back then when they died.
My father broke the pattern:
managed to hang on longer,
managed to avoid the floorboards
until his pancreas ate him alive,
slowly, letting him spend his
last few ancient days in his own
drug-comfortable bed, dreaming.
I’ve still got a few dreams coming,
I think; but these days, when I’ve
made it to ‘old’ but ‘ancient’ seems
unlikely, I wake up, roll over in bed
look at my slippers on the floor,
and feel like I’m flipping a coin
when I reach to pick them up.
Ron. Lavalette lives on Vermont’s Canadian border. His poetry, flash fiction, and creative nonfiction has been very widely published in both print and pixel forms. His first chapbook, Fallen Away, is now available from Finishing Line Press. A reasonable sample of his work can be found at EGGS OVER TOKYO : http://eggsovertokyo.blogspot.com
Image via Pixabay
The Cabinet of Heed 