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.

Alan Bennett: It is as if a hand has come out and taken yours

The best moments in reading are when you come across something – a thought, a feeling, a way of looking at things – which you had thought special and particular to you. Now you have it, set down by someone else, a person you have never met, someone who is long dead. And it is as if a hand has come out and taken yours.

         --Hector, a history teacher in "The History Boys," play by Alan Bennett (1934- )

George Herbert: Who would have thought my shrivel'd heart could have recovered greennesse?... now in age I bud again.

The Flower

How fresh, O Lord, how sweet and clean
are thy returns! even as the flowers in spring;
             to which, besides their own demean,
the late-past frosts tributes of pleasure bring.
                                      grief melts away
                                      like snow in May,
             as if there were no such cold thing.

Who would have thought my shriveled heart
could have recovered greenness? It was gone
             quite under ground; as flowers depart
to see their mother-root, when they have blown;
                                      where they together
                                      all the hard weather,
             dead to the world, keep house unknown.

These are thy wonders, Lord of power,
killing and quickning, bringing down to hell
             and up to heaven in an houre;
making a chiming of a passing-bell,
                                      we say amiss,
                                      this or that is:
             thy word is all, if we could spell.

O that I once past changing were;
fast in thy Paradise, where no flower can wither!
             Many a spring I shoot up fair,
offering at heaven, growing and groning thither:
                                      nor doth my flower
                                      want a spring-shower,
             my sins and I joining together;

But while I grow to a straight line;
still upwards bent, as if heaven were mine own,
             thy anger comes, and I decline:
what frost to that? what pole is not the zone,
                                     where all things burn,
                                      when thou dost turn,
             and the least frown of thine is shown?

And now in age I bud again,
after so many deaths I live and write;
             I once more smell the dew and rain,
and relish versing: O my only light,
                                      it cannot be
                                      that I am he
             on whom thy tempests fell all night.

These are thy wonders, Lord of love,
to make us see we are but flowers that glide:
             which when we once can finde and prove,
thou hast a garden for us, where to bide.
                                      who would be more,
                                      swelling through store,
             forfeit their Paradise by their pride.

                --George Herbert (1593-1633) wrote this poem the year he died.

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

Susan Whitmore: You're never going to have your normal life back, but it doesn't mean it won't be a good life

[Susan Whitmore lost her only child, Erika, in 2002.  She set up a foundation for other grieving parents.] 

Grieving... is a life-long process...."You have to create a lot of new memories over a long time without that child," she explains, "so that you can rebuild your life....You're never going to have your normal life back, but it doesn't mean it won't be a good life. It will be a different life, a new life."

   --From an article by Katie Grim in Westside Today, December 2007

Mark Doty: Dogs show you why you might want to live

It isn't that one wants to live for the sake of a dog, exactly, but that dogs show you why you might want to.

        --Mark Doty (1953- ) in Dog Years

Antoine de Saint-Exupéry: The dead more present and more powerful than the living

The dead, if one venerates their memory, are more present and more powerful than the living.

        --Antoine de Saint-Exupéry (1900-1944), Citadelle, translated into English as Wisdom of the Sands

Le disparu si l'on vénère sa mémoire est plus présent et plus puissant que le vivant.   

Khaled Hosseini: When pain slips away

Closing Sohrab's door, I wondered if that was how forgiveness budded, not with the fanfare of epiphany, but with pain gathering its things, packing up, and slipping away unannounced in the middle of the night.

     --From The Kite Runner by Khaled Hosseini (1955- )

Nikki Giovanni: No one can get well without love

No one can get well without love.

        --Nikki Giovanni (1943-)

George Sand on curing the soul

We take great trouble and impose privations on ourselves to heal our bodies; we can surely, I think, do as much to heal the soul.

        --George Sand (pen name of Amantine Aurore Lucile Dupin, Baronne Dudevant)(1804-1876) in Lélia

On se donne bien de la peine et on s'impose bien des privations pour guérir le corps ; on peut bien, je pense, en faire autant pour guérir l'âme.