Prayers: Remembrance

REMEMBRANCE

by Le Sterner, my uncle, 1967

Among the dead are many of our relatives and friends... Mary Sterner, Barbara Frishmuth, Arthur Murphy, Henry McCarthy...

Are they lost to us? No, I will not believe that we have lost them.

While we all have known, or thought we knew from childhood, that death must eventually come to each of us, only where others were concerned has it ever been something real, immediate, something that happens. No, only when others were involved -- we see it all about us every day -- was it ever a reality.

Oh, yes, death was something that would come to us and our loved ones eventually --
but not here, not now, nor in the foreseeable future -- but in some dim distant time
that for all practical purposes would be never.

So long as there is life we cannot really conceive of the actuality of death
for ourselves or for our loved ones.

And who is there to say that this is not right? Perhaps this is our soul's instinctive intuiting that death is in itself
an unimportant, inconsequential event signifying nothing -- a floating moment
of transition, of release from this chrysalis, this corporeal abode, this ailing body -- at best a poorly-fitting imperfect garment to be cast off and set aside at death -- when the soul at last may journey free
of its encumbrance?

Perhaps this is our soul's instinctive intuiting that it -- our consciousness
of self, the "I" within -- will never die?

No, I prefer to believe we have not lost them, that on this journey we all must take they have only gone on ahead a little while before us, and soon when it is our turn
we shall be with them again.

For in all of time, the longest lifespan
is but a single short day, in which we are born with the rising sun and die at dusk.

But of this I think we can be sure: how much better for them that they went before us,
to be spared the grief we know. How glad we should be that they will not have to live with worry over us, nor sorrow at our passing as we are sorrowed now by theirs.

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