Among Those Missing

I was never there when any of them died:
my mother, my father, my sisters, my brother,
close friends, other loved ones—I was always
somewhere else (not on purpose, mind you,
but still, I often think about this, just the same…).
The death-bed scene was written into our parents’
Victorian sensibilities, a focal point
for future mourning, but it so happens
I was always among the missing;
for me, the last time was always some time before,
so that the final looks, the final gestures, the words
often memorialized in a nation’s fiction
as well as in the unforgettable facts,
were never ever there
for me to hold up in memory’s glass
as a poignant toast at the point of departure …
I’m the poorer for these absences
—the chevrons of service denied,
the Last Post just out of earshot.