Deathwatch
Ian Duhig
I thought being old was child’s play, no more painful than grey hair; “It’s nothing” Dad would wince and say. Perhaps he knew I didn’t care. Dad’s age when he died, I’ve long known how wrong I was: joints swell and twist at knee and ankle, shoulder, wrist where raw bone grinds against raw bone. Like him, I’ll hide pain, face as ashen, pretend I bend to tie my shoe. Now bowels don’t suggest compassion: bloody flare-ups strip their screw as IBD, COPD join OCD – yet nerves feel free and fit to highlight every pain. But memories cloud, names fall like rain. All his family who’d died would slip my older brother’s mind till prompted by the dim-but-kind. I can’t forget the way he cried. Mnemonic more than lyrical, rhyme’s how I wind my way through age, science’s great miracle: prolonging life in its worst stage. The deathwatch in me rocks and ticks, a tethered beetle’s spellbound tread around its twisting maze of thread and, like my twisting bones, it clicks. Concertina wheeze of lung, labyrinthine cramp-struck guts, unwinding mind . . . no ifs, no buts, I’m only glad that I’m not young.