Death and Mourning

Do not wait for the last judgement. It comes every day.

You know a real friend? Someone you know will look after your cat after you are gone.

Every year without knowing it I have passed the day.

 

a fruitless enterprise, a great mistake, a decrepit frenzy, and rightly viewed, a corpse, some dust, a shadow, mere nothingness.

 

And I pray one prayer—I repeat it till my tongue stiffens—Catherine Earnshaw, may you not rest as long as I am living; you said I killed you—haunt me, then! The murdered do haunt their murderers, I believe. I know that ghosts have wandered on earth. Be with me always— take any form—drive me mad! only do not leave me in this abyss, where I cannot find you! Oh, God! it is unutterable! I cannot live without my life! I cannot live without my soul!

 

Atque in perpetuum, frater, ave atque vale.

 

Dear as remember’d kisses after death, And sweet as those by hopeless fancy feign’d On lips that are for others; deep as love, Deep as first love, and wild with all regret; O Death in Life, the days that are no more.

 

They told me to take a streetcar named Desire, and transfer to one called Cemeteries, and ride six blocks and get off at—Elysian Fields!

On the seashore of endless worlds children meet. Tempest roams in the pathless sky, ships are wrecked in the trackless water, death is abroad and children play. On the seashore of endless worlds is the great meeting of children.

The relatives of a suicide always take it in bad part that he did not remain alive out of consideration for the family dignity.

In every parting there is an image of death.

I speak no comfort to you, for there is no comfort for such pain within the circles of the world. The uttermost choice is before you: to repent and go to the Havens and bear away into the West the memory of our days together that shall there be evergreen but never more than memory; or else to abide the Doom of Men.

 

In Memoriam.

 

Rain falls into the open eyes of the dead

 

Have you built your ship of death, O have you?

 

We are dying, we are dying, we are all of us dying.

 

And if tonight my soul may find her peace

 

Soldiers! When it is announced that a respected and beloved leader has died for our freedom in the course of a battle, do not grieve, do not lose hope! Observe that anyone who dies for his country is a fortunate man, but death takes what it wants, indiscriminately, in peacetime as well as in war. It is better to die with freedom than without it.

 

He watched, stunned, and while he was watching, Rick died. He could tell when it happened. There was a difference.

 

To rest upon a formula is a slumber that, prolonged, means death.

To be forgotten is to sleep in peace with the undisturbed myriads, no longer subject to the chills and heats, the blasts, the sleet, the dust, which assail in endless succession that shadow of a man which we call his reputation.

Our brains are seventy-year clocks. The Angel of Life winds them up once for all, then closes the case, and gives the key into the hand of the Angel of the Resurrection.

Our final experience, like our first, is conjectural. We move between two darknesses.

Hell is the bloodcurdling mansion of time, in whose profoundest circle Satan himself waits, winding a gargantuan watch in his hand.