A Post About Death
What a great topic, right? But appropriate. We have dealt with death this past week and marked death's anniversary.
Experiencing death is a very interesting rite of passage in life. Those who do not have great exposure to death often times have a sense of innocence not yet lost, a beauty that is sweet and lovely. Those of us who have been through the passage -- truly mourned, truly lost, truly felt a death that seemed a part of our very beings with the death of a loved one -- cannot go back. Few become bitter or completely afraid of death. Few who go well into adulthood without facing death may become cavalier, immature about the subject.
Life is full of death, and death full of Life. Our lives are often lived with how it will effect our death and thereafter. The deaths we experience greatly impact our lives.
Some times, it feels as though certain people should not be gone. Contacts that will never again pop-up on my cell phone with a call. Invites will sit, unaddressed, for people that cannot receive them. Life events will go on, unshared, and feel like an old injury that comes back with the rain. A slow, subtle, but not debilitating discomfort and pain.
Do you know what quite possibly is my favorite poem? Robert Frost's Nothing Gold Can Stay. It is a simple, quiet explanation of Death and an unassuming acceptance of the inevitable. It's words ring in my head with every loss, every memory of loss, and every attempt to live life both in light of the death's of others and in preparation for my own death.
Experiencing death is a very interesting rite of passage in life. Those who do not have great exposure to death often times have a sense of innocence not yet lost, a beauty that is sweet and lovely. Those of us who have been through the passage -- truly mourned, truly lost, truly felt a death that seemed a part of our very beings with the death of a loved one -- cannot go back. Few become bitter or completely afraid of death. Few who go well into adulthood without facing death may become cavalier, immature about the subject.
Life is full of death, and death full of Life. Our lives are often lived with how it will effect our death and thereafter. The deaths we experience greatly impact our lives.
Some times, it feels as though certain people should not be gone. Contacts that will never again pop-up on my cell phone with a call. Invites will sit, unaddressed, for people that cannot receive them. Life events will go on, unshared, and feel like an old injury that comes back with the rain. A slow, subtle, but not debilitating discomfort and pain.
Do you know what quite possibly is my favorite poem? Robert Frost's Nothing Gold Can Stay. It is a simple, quiet explanation of Death and an unassuming acceptance of the inevitable. It's words ring in my head with every loss, every memory of loss, and every attempt to live life both in light of the death's of others and in preparation for my own death.
Nothing Gold Can Stay
Nature's first green is gold,
Her hardest hue to hold.
Her early leaf's a flower;
But only so an hour.
Then leaf subsides to leaf.
So Eden sank to grief,
So dawn goes down to day.
Nothing gold can stay.
~In Loving Memory~
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