She Has Chosen the Date

She’s not getting married.
She’s not getting engaged.
She’s not travelling, though
She is going away….. forever.

My friend has chosen the date
for her death.
Her assisted death.
28th September 2025.

I’ve been invited to attend.
A privilege indeed.

She has battled cancer and all
therapies have now been discontinued.
She waits,confined to bed.
Still lucid but on morphine and methodone.

Death won’t bring her peace.
You have to be alive to know peace.
What death brings is a mystery
and a return of borrowed energy
back to the universe from where it came.

🙏🙏🙏🙏🙏🙏🙏🙏🙏🙏🙏🙏

She is not taking a lover’s veil,
nor tossing coins in fountains for dreams.
The earth will not hold up her gown
no rice, no roses,
only the hands of time, folded,
measuring the air that remains.

She is not leaving on a plane.
There is no suitcase swept with perfume.
No passport. No camera. No vistas.
Just a bed—still, white, wide as silence
and morphine like slow wings
tied to her breath.

She is going away.
Not passively, like leaves that forget the branch.
She is going with the dignity of fire
that chooses its ember.
She is going
on the day she gave a name to parting:
28th September
a date etched not on calendars,
but on the flesh of those who remain.

How courageous to choose
what all of us must suffer blindly.
How human,
to stare into the mirror where the end
has already begun
and still say:
“Here. I walk this hour with open eyes.”

You call it a privilege:
to be summoned
to sip the final wine of her hours
before the bottle returns to sand.
Yes, to witness
this sovereign claiming of threshold
not surrender, but selection.

My friend, she has burned
through chemotherapy’s deserts,
survived the tyrannies of sleepless white rooms,
and now she lies,not defeated
but peeled to essence.
Voice still keen beneath drugged fog,
lucid enough to whisper

the mystery:
Death is not peace.
Peace is a living thing,
a ripple across a pond touched by sun.
Death is the hushed removal
of rented light,
the quiet unfastening
of flame.

And the soul?
A paper boat
folded from the breath of stars
surrendered back to the dark waters.
Not lost.
Just loaned again
to the cosmos
from which it came.