Sedulia on Grief

Henry Van Dyke: Her diminished size is in me, not in her

I am standing upon the seashore. A ship at my side spreads her white sails to the morning breeze and starts for the blue ocean. She is an object of beauty and strength. I stand and watch her until at length she hangs like a speck of white cloud just where the sea and sky come to mingle with each other.

Then someone at my side says: "There, she is gone."

"Gone where?"

Gone from my sight. That is all. She is just as large in mast and hull and spar as she was when she left my side and she is just as able to bear her load of living freight to her destined port.

Her diminished size is in me, not in her. And just at the moment when someone at my side says "There, she is gone," there are other eyes watching her coming, and other voices ready to take up the glad shout "Here she comes!"

And that is dying.

   --Henry Van Dyke (1852-1933)

If you know the source of this quotation, please let me know.

Mark Twain after the death of his wife: I am a man without a country.

I am a man without a country. Wherever Livy was, that was my country.

      --Samuel Clemens (Mark Twain) (1835-1910), after the death of his wife Olivia Langdon Clemens, in a letter to a her brother.

Do not stand at my grave and weep

Do not stand at my grave and weep.
I am not there.
I do not sleep

I am a thousand winds that swiftly blow.
I am the diamond glint
on newly fallen snow.
I am the sunlight
on ripened grain.
I am the soft and gentle autumn rain

When you wake from sleep in the early morning hush,
I am the swift, uplifting rush
of quiet birds in circling flight.
I am the soft, starlight at night.

Do not stand at my grave and weep.
I am not there.
I do not sleep.

     --Attributed to Mary E. Frye (1904-2004)

Walt Whitman's nephew died young

In the middle of the room, in its white coffin, lay the dead child, the nephew of the poet. Near it, in a great chair, sat Walt Whitman, surrounded by little ones, and holding a beautiful little girl on his lap. She looked wonderingly at the spectacle of death, and then inquiringly into the old man's face. 'You don't know what it is, do you, my dear?' said he, and added, 'We don't, either.'

         --Mary Mapes Dodge (1831-1905), a friend of poet Walt Whitman's, in the preface to a poem.

Emerson: Earth endures, stars abide

Hear what the Earth says:—

Earth-Song

"Mine and yours;
  Mine, not yours.
  Earth endures;
  Stars abide—
  Shine down in the old sea;
  Old are the shores;
  But where are old men?
  I who have seen much,
  Such have I never seen.

"The lawyer's deed
  Ran sure,
  In tail,
  To them, and to their heirs
  Who shall succeed,
  Without fail,
  Forevermore.

"Here is the land,
  Shaggy with wood,
  With its old valley,
  Mound and flood.
  But the heritors?—

"Fled like the flood's foam.
  The lawyer, and the laws,
  And the kingdom,
  Clean swept herefrom.

"They called me theirs,
  Who so controlled me;
  Yet every one
  Wished to stay, and is gone,
  How am I theirs,
  If they cannot hold me,
  But I hold them?"

When I heard the Earth-song
I was no longer brave;
My avarice cooled
Like lust in the chill of the grave.

   --From "Hamatreya," by Ralph Waldo Emerson (1803-1882)

Nikki Wheidt: I miss my Dad

I miss my dad,
when I think about him it makes me sad.
Sometimes I wake up at night,
to put his photos out of sight.
He used to drive a motor bike,
he also loved to hike.
I wonder what it would be like to have a dad,
a dad is something I've never had.
It hurts to say his name,
I wish things weren't the same.
he died when I was two,
my mum misses him too,
It makes me mad,
that I never knew my dad.

       --Nikki Wheidt.  "I have no proffesional background because it would be hard for me to have one because I'm 13." 

Margaret Bruner: The memory of my mother stays with me

The memory of my mother stays with me
throughout the years: the way she used to stand
framed in the door when any of her band
of children left... as long as she could see
their forms, she gazed, as if she seemed to be
trying to guard-- to meet some far demand;
and then before she turned to tasks at hand,
she breathed a little prayer inaudibly.

And now, I think, in some far heavenly place,
she watches still, and yet is not distressed,
but rather as one who, after life's long race,
has found contentment in a well-earned rest,
there, in a peaceful dreamlike reverie,
she waits, from earthly cares forever free.

       --Margaret Baggerly Bruner (1886-1970)

Netta Wilson: I lost my child today

I lost my child today
People came to weep and cry
as I just sat and stared, dry eyed
They struggled to find words to say
to try and make the pain go away
I walked the floor in disbelief
I lost my child today.

I lost my child last month
Most of the people went away
Some still call and some still stay
I wait to wake up from this dream
This can't be real, I want to scream
Yet everything is locked inside
God, help me, I want to die
I lost my child last month.

I lost my child last year
Now people who had came, have gone
I sit and struggle all day long
to bear the pain so deep inside
And now my friends just question Why?
Why does this mother not move on?
Just sits and sings the same old song
Good heavens, it has been so long
I lost my child last year.

Time has not moved on for me
The numbness it has disappeared
My eyes have now cried many tears
I see the look upon your face
"She must move on and leave this place"
Yet I am trapped right here in time
The song’s the same, as is the rhyme
I lost my child.........today

        --Netta Wilson, written in memory of her daughter Caprice Cara Wilson, who was killed in an auto accident (December 2, 1968 - November 20, 1994). Printed in the newsletter of The Compassionate Friends, Atlanta, May-June 2001

If you know how to reach Netta Wilson, please let me know.

Longfellow: The Cross of Snow

In the long, sleepless watches of the night,
a gentle face--the face of one long dead--
looks at me from the wall, where round its head
the night-lamp casts a halo of pale light.
Here in this room she died, and soul more white
never through martyrdom of fire was led
to its repose; nor can in books be read
the legend of a life more benedight.*
There is a mountain in the distant West
that, sun-defying, in its deep ravines
displays a cross of snow upon its side.
Such is the cross I wear upon my breast
these eighteen years, through all the changing scenes
and seasons, changeless since the day she died.

      --Henry Wadsworth Longfellow (1807-1882). His beloved wife Frances Appleton had died in 1861 of burns suffered when her dress caught fire. The famous photographer William Henry Jackson took the photo in the mountains of Colorado in 1873; the photo became famous and the mountain was named Mountain of the Holy Cross.

* blessed

Jan de Hartog: If only I could believe the rhyme: "There is an old belief...."

If only I could believe the rhyme I had once found scribbled on the inside of a wardrobe in wartime England when I was billeted there during the war:

There is an old belief that on some distant shore,
far from despair and grief, old friends shall meet once more.

But I could not believe it. She was gone, forever.

      --Jan de Hartog (1914-2002) in A View of the Ocean (2007)  a memoir about the death of his mother