No One

Jason Shinder died of cancer at the age of 52.  According to Wikipedia, he had put off going to the doctor to get the lumps in his throat checked.  Then, he was negligent with his chemo and meds.  In his poem, Company, he wrote:

I’ve been avoiding my illness
because I’m afraid
I will die and when I do,
I’ll end up alone again



I wonder if in his death, he realized his deepest fears of aloneness or if he found that those were only stories made up in his mind.  Or, did he vanish into the big, beautiful nothingness where no beliefs are real?

I found out about Jason after reading this poem that was sent to me yesterday:

Alone for the Fifth Day

When I look at the ocean for a long time, the blue

and restless driven waves, I keep looking, I keep looking,
I keep looking at the waves swaying in the wind

like a metronome, wired for the sound of a sleeping heart,

and I keep looking with the silence of the sun
on the windowpane, and I keep looking and do not stop

looking deeper into waves as if into the middle

of a woman's body, where the soul and spirit
have no human bonds, and I begin never to turn away

from looking though I am frightened but keep looking

beyond what I know until I can hardly think or breathe
because I have arrived, with the need to be me disappearing

into the beautiful waves, reflecting no one, nothing, no one.

 - Jason Shinder