No More Time (2017) | A Poem About Death by Ephemeral Dawn

Behind the Words:

I wrote this around 5pm on the same day I’d learned of the sudden death of my friend. I was 16 years old.

He was actually one of my Dad’s friends, who naturally I’d come to know through Dad. As the poem implies, he’d often visit at the weekends, becoming one of Dad’s closest drinking friends and often sharing delicious food he’d got, or made, with us.

I remember the occasion of this poem with painful clarity. It was Good Friday – an epithet I was long-after reluctant to apply to that day – and I was playing a videogame called Cities: Skylines, which lets you design and manage large cities. Dad was the one who came in, stoic at the time, and told me he had died.

At first I didn’t believe him. Not that this was a subject to joke about, and not that Dad would be the person to joke about it, but the news was unexpected and that made it hard to believe. We’d see him often – it’s very unlikely it had been more than a week or so since his last visit. It didn’t make sense that he was gone.

Later that day, around dinner time, the pain of his loss started to land for me. This is when I wrote No More Time. Not long after that, as was customary when I wrote a poem, I went down to read it to Mum and Dad. I choked up getting towards the end, and in that moment was the first time I remember ever seeing my Dad cry too. He came and hugged me, and told me the poem was lovely. I think he thanked me for it too, or said something to the effect that our friend would have been honoured by it. I think in some way this poem was permission for my Dad to mourn the death of his own friend, as well; to not have to put on a brave face through it all – an unfair burden to place against anyone in grief.

I made a note in the original document to myself that I wasn’t sure this poem was actually much good. The line about the death being expected is a twist of context: he drank a lot, and it was in that sense we ‘expected’ he’d go one day, but he wasn’t known to be ill – at least not to me – so the news was unexpected as I heard it. Some of more the wording is awkward and would benefit from some refining too, in partcular the lines about not knowing him well, but him being like an uncle. What I meant by this is that in his character, he reminded me of an uncle. This gave an intimacy to the relationship that made him feel more like a distant relative than a distant friend, which I think is also partly why it hurt so much when he died. I would edit the poem to better reflect all this but I wrote it mere hours after his passing – these are the words that flowed on that sorrowful day, and for that there is something sacred in them for me. Except for formal publication I am therefore unwilling to change it.

The friend who the poem is about was the sort of man who had a kind light in his eyes. Old, long-ish white hair, and weathered-looking – a hard life of work and drinking took its toll in the end – he was easy company, and still deeply in love with the things he valued around him. He had family abroad with young children (to whom I presume he would have been a grandfather) and he would visit them, and speak warmly of them to us, showing us photos with endearing pride.

The only photos I have of him are actually from his last visit to go and see those relatives – memory vaguely tells me in Amsterdam. It still hurts to look at them now, almost a decade later. He looks so alive there, just as I remember him. I can still hear his voice when I look at them too.

I can’t remember why – my guess would be school – but I wasn’t able to go to his funeral. This, I still regret: he is the only person I know, who died, who I never got to say goodbye to. Maybe that, too, is why I wrote this poem. Not that I could have known at the time, but I didn’t know how else to process his death. In contrast, I’ve found myself unable to write a poem again in the wake of any of the five deaths that have intimately touched my life since.