Do not misunderstand! This is not about suicide. It is about letting go, and knowing that no one lives forever.

It is also the flip side of David Singer’s frenetic pursuit of immortality in To Go Not Gently, in Serial, and in the novel A Fond Farewell to Dying.

Enough

The old man walked the narrow path
That snaked between the boulder falls,
Past the sound of water moving
Deep within the willow thickets,
Upward toward the one lone tree
That marked the juncture of the sky.

There he stopped beneath the tree
Where the cliff fell sheer away.
A thousand feet below him lay
Tall tips of trees, and the sun,
Yellowed by the rising dust
And reddened by the end of day.

The old man eased his bones
Gently into roots’ embrace,
And looking out, he said, “Enough.”

“Ten thousand sunsets I have seen,
“I do not need to see another.”

All his life came to him then;
Marched in review before his eyes,
Comrades, children, and his wives.
Briefly his — now all passed on,
Briefly his — forever gone.

He settled deeper into soil,
And closed his eyes to outward sight.
The birds he heard were decades past;
The smell was lilacs overhead,
When he first lay with his first wife.

His heart, filled up with that which was,
He closed to passage of his blood;
And was complete.