First Edit: Dying Alone

[Achebe]

Dying Alone

The thought of dying first is killing me.
I know we searched and found our path, my wife, ....there aren't many words that rhyme with 'wife', apart from 'life', 'strife' and 'knife'....and 'rife', of course. One way to make the lines appear less forced here is to enjamb eg. We and found our path, my wife / and I, like sleuths resolve a mystery / but clues, etc.
like great detectives solve a mystery,
but clues won't guarantee an afterlife. ... the vagueness of this line disturbs me. It's almost as if you needed the 'afterlife' to rhyme with 'wife' and constructed the rest of the sentence around it. If you and your wife "solved" the mystery of life from its "clues", then the doubt here is meaningless. Otherwise, you didn't "solve" the mystery like a great detective does. The whole stanza is held hostage to the 'wife / life' rhyme.

Some nights I cage these fears inside my mind,
yet I am trapped by knowing people die
at any time, and leave their love behind,
while in the earth what's left of them must lie. ...again, this line adds nothing to the stanza and is forced to exist to rhyme with "die"

So now the trail is lost or done; no light
will end a tunnel, nor begin this trip.
I'll curse my daily nap, too old to fight,
before the evening warms my lonely lip. ...this is actually an ok line. I'd have preferred something other than 'lonely', such as 'thirsty', given the allusion to whisky

And when I think I've overcome my fears,
they'll make a grand escape; their tracks my tears. ...convoluted

overall - I like what you're trying to say, but the rhymes destroy the poem for me