Consolatio

Emily Dickinson: I measure every grief I meet with analytic eyes

I measure every grief I meet
with analytic eyes;
I wonder if it weighs like mine,
or has an easier size.

I wonder if they bore it long,
or did it just begin?
I could not tell the date of mine,
it feels so old a pain.

I wonder if it hurts to live,
and if they have to try,
and whether, could they choose between,
they would not rather die.

I wonder if when years have piled--
some thousands--on the cause
of early hurt, if such a lapse
could give them any pause;

or would they go on aching still
through centuries above,
enlightened to a larger pain
by contrast with the love.

The grieved are many, I am told;
the reason deeper lies,--
death is but one and comes but once
and only nails the eyes.

There's grief of want, and grief of cold,--
a sort they call 'despair,'
there's banishment from native eyes,
in sight of native air.

And though I may not guess the kind
correctly yet to me
a piercing comfort it affords
in passing Calvary,

to note the fashions of the cross
of those that stand alone
still fascinated to presume
that some are like my own.

          --Emily Dickinson (1830-1886)

Rabindranath Tagore: Death has brought thy call to my home

LXXXVI.

Death, thy servant, is at my door. He has crossed the unknown sea and brought thy call to my home.

The night is dark and my heart is fearful-- yet I will take up the lamp, open my gates and bow to him my welcome. It is thy messenger who stands at my door.

I will worship him with folded hands, and with tears. I will worship him placing at his feet the treasure of my heart.

He will go back with his errand done, leaving a dark shadow on my morning; and in my desolate home only my forlorn self will remain as my last offering to thee.

       --"Gitanjali" (Song Offerings) of Rabindranath Tagore (1861-1941) in Collected Poems and Plays (1951).

Jayne Anne Phillips: People forget that a soldier's death goes on for years

People forget that a soldier's death goes on for years-- for a generation, really. They leave people behind.

     --Jayne Anne Phillips (1952- ) in Lark and Termite (2009)

Prince William: Never being able to say the word "mummy" again in your life sounds like a small thing

Losing a close family member is one of the hardest experiences anyone can endure. Never being able to say the word 'mummy' again in your life sounds like a small thing. However, for many, including me, it is now really just a word -- hollow and evoking only memories....Life is altered as you know it, and not a day goes past without you thinking about the one you have lost. However, I also know that over time it is possible to learn to live with what has happened and, with the passing of years, to retain or rediscover cherished memories.

   --Prince William of England, discussing the loss of his mother for the first time in public, as he made an appearance to aid a British charity's campaign "Remember on Mother's Day," 12 March 2009 (Mother's Day in the U.K.). His mother, Diana, Princess of Wales, died on August 31st, 1997 when he was fifteen and his brother Harry was twelve.

Carrie Fisher: Life can be just as demanding as death

 

After Greg died I stopped talking. It was as if my personality followed him down the dark passage of death and left someone who looked a lot like me....The thing about someone dying, though, is that life goes on. While your loved one is busy relaxing in their cozy coffin, you still have appointments, a job, friends, children —-a whole parcel of  living things pulling on you to get on with it. I mean, life can be just as demanding as death, in its own way.

Our family chain is broken

Our family chain is broken, and nothing seems the same;
but as God calls us one by one the chain will link again.

              --Unknown

Izumi Shikibu: Why did you vanish into the empty sky?

 
Why did you vanish
into the empty sky?
Even the fragile snow,
when it falls,
falls in this world.

               --Izumi Shikibu (和泉式部) b 976?, woman poet of the Heian period, Japan. Her daughter, also a gifted poet, died in childbirth. Translation by Jane Hirshfield and Mariki Aratani in The Ink Dark Moon..

などて君むなしき空に消えにけん淡雪だにもふればふる世に

Emily Dickinson: It struck me every day

It struck me every day
the lightning was as new
as if the cloud that instant slit
and let the fire through.

It burned me in the night,
it blistered in my dream;
it sickened fresh upon my sight
with every morning's beam.

I thought that storm was brief,--
the maddest, quickest by;
but Nature lost the date of this
and left it in the sky.

              --Emily Dickinson (1830-1886), poem 132

Joan Wickersham: When you kill yourself, you kill every memory everyone has of you

When you kill yourself, you kill every memory everyone has of you. You're saying, "I'm gone and you can't even be sure who it is that's gone, because you never knew me."

       --Joan Wickersham (1957-), in The Suicide Index: Putting My Father's Death in Order (pub. 2008)

Christina Rossetti: Remember me when I am gone away

Remember me when I am gone away,
gone far away into the silent land;
when you can no more hold me by the hand,
nor I half turn to go, yet turning stay.

Remember me when no more day by day
you tell me of our future that you planned:
only remember me; you understand
it will be late to counsel then or pray.

Yet if you should forget me for a while
and afterwards remember, do not grieve:
for if the darkness and corruption leave
a vestige of the thoughts that once I had,

better by far you should forget and smile
than that you should remember and be sad.

         --Christina Rossetti (1830-1894)