Death and Mourning

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

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.

 

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!

 

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.

After sixty years the stern sentence of the burial service seems to have a meaning that one did not notice in former years. There begins to be something personal about it.

What once was cuddled must learn to kiss/The cold worm’s mouth. That’s all the mystery.

Most persons have died before they expire—died to all earthly longings, so that the last breath is only, as it were, the locking of the door of the already deserted mansion.

In the dust where we have buried the silent races and their abominations we have buried so much of the delicate magic of life.

We are all sentenced to capital punishment for the crime of living, and though the condemned cell of our earthly existence is but a narrow and bare dwelling-place, we have adjusted ourselves to it, and made it tolerably comfortable for the little while we are to be confined in it.

In this life there’s nothing new in dying,

 

Death has made His darkness beautiful with thee.

 

Death tugs at my ear and says: "Live, I am coming.

The crime of suicide lies in its disregard for the feelings of those whom we leave behind. E. M.