I put the mud away and forgot about it (writing mud is easy enough to do when I am emotional, but writing poetry often requires that I am in a more detached frame of mind). Half a year later I was looking over some of the mud in my notebook, and came across the lines about my grandfather's death. I noticed that the piece began and ended with the same phrase, "illusion of self". 

I knew that a lot of Irish poems repeat beginning words, phrases or lines at the end, and I was interested in trying an Irish form as an exercise. I started looking through Turco's Book of Forms for an appropriate Irish form. I settled on studying the droighneach, because it had the ending word/phrase repetition, and because it had alliteration and word types that I could see coming out of my mud. I began, as I do with most unfamiliar forms, by writing down notes about the form. My notes from Turco's description looked like this:
 

The last lines of code were copied to use as a map of the form while I wrote-a's and b's represented rhyming syllables. Since I could find no example of the form, I decided to go with what I had and make an attempt.

Finding no example was good, in a way, because I could interpret Turco's description of the form to make the writing a little less difficult. For one thing, I did not have to rhyme perfectly: I decided to rhyme very lightly, rhyming just the end syllable of each line, even if it was unstressed (a technique I have seen in other Irish forms). The only difficulty I foresaw was finding enough words with three syllables in them to use at the ends of lines, but that turned out to be the easy part. I also wanted to have the poem show some of the bitterness I felt when I had written the mud. Here is my first take at some lines:
 

Kind of sketchy, but I figured that with a lot of massaging and rewriting I could hack out the whole thing. The fact that "illusion" is a trisyllable word almost forces it to be the last word of the poem; "illusion of self", my favorite phrase, cannot end the poem without breaking the form (which at this point I was willing to do-it could still be a poem, even if it was not a droighneach). Here's my second attempt:
 

Now I was getting somewhere (slowly). My quatrain-grouping was abandoned in my efforts to make couplets have light rhyme to connect them. But meanwhile, the poem was beginning to look hopeful. I was keeping original thoughts and thinking of others as I tried to fit them into the droighneach structure. Here is an almost final version, set into quatrains:
 

At this point the poem was almost complete. It had a beginning, middle, and end-although a few symbols, images, and adjectives could be thrown into a couple stanzas to tighten it up. It more or less followed the droighneach form, but needed a little more alliteration at the ends of stanzas, and the line lengths (in syllable count) needed to be evened out a bit. The meter was predominately iambic, and could be strengthened-though at this point I wasn't too worried about the meter (the triplets at the ends of the lines seem to hold the meter together, and the form allows for a loose beat). 

It was mostly the thematic continuity that needed help. I struggled with it a while, reading the quasi-poem over and over and mentally inserting phrases. Then I thought of the image that I needed, that could be presented in several places throughout the poem to bring it all together. I would use the image of my hands. Throughout the poem the occasional images of my hands and their actions would show reflections of my feelings of grief and anticipation of loss. Here is the final poem, with a title: 
 

Now the alliteration at the ends of the stanzas helped to solidify the meter, and the subtle mention of hands in at least three places throughout the poem kept the stanzas linked thematically (or symbolically). 

When I passed this poem out most of the reviews were favorable; the biggest problem that readers seemed to have with it was the title, which I must agree is kind of lame. In the first place, nobody knows what a droighneach is, much less a dying one. Also, to most readers the poem has very little bitterness in it. This was strange for me to discover, because I see signs of implied bitterness throughout the piece. I have yet to change the poem's title, (the major reason I've kept it so far is that it keeps a droighneach beat, and acts like one of the lines in the poem) but if I submit it to a magazine or journal I'll probably change it to Illusion of Self or something like that.