A Poem for Mike

requiescat in pace

I just learned of the death of a friend, Mike Eaton, whom I knew at university in the late 1970s and early 80s. Although we had not met in person again since 1983, we kept in intermittent contact. Even as a student he had suffered from a physical condition that he bore with cheerful good humour; his internal organs were displaced or missing, and he used to joke that if he went to a new hospital he would have to take a map with him so that the doctors would know where his stomach, heart and (single) lung were located.

I had somehow imagined that, despite the gap of 40 years since our last meeting, we would one day meet at some College reunion or similar occasion. Now that will not happen, and it feels like a sad truncation. I wrote a short poem about Mike, and because I know he would have liked me to, I translated it into Latin elegiac verse.

We hadn’t met for forty years, my friend 
from student days, and suddenly, you died. 
Your life now has beginning, middle, end:
How can that be, when hopes and plans abide?

Quadrāginta annos priscum non videram amicum
    quocum olim studui: morte repente cadis.
ortum, tum mediam, nunc finem vita peregit:
     quid? cum praemia adhuc tantaque coepta manent?