Death is Nothing At All
Someone sent me this poem 17 years ago when I lost my first daughter. Perhaps you have heard it before. For some reason it helped.
Death is nothing at all..I have only slipped away into the next room..I am I and you are you..whatever we were to each other that we are still. Call me by my old familiar name, speak to me in the easy way which you always used. Put no difference into your tone; wear no forced air of solemnity or sorrow. Laugh as we always laughed at the little jokes we enjoyed together. Play, smile, think of me, pray for me. Let my name be ever the household word that it was. Let it be spoken without effort, without the ghost of a shadow on it. Life means all that it ever meant. It is the same as it ever was; there is absolutely unbroken continuity. What is death but a negligible accident? I am waiting for you, for an interval, somewhere very near just around the corner. All is well.
Death is nothing at all..I have only slipped away into the next room..I am I and you are you..whatever we were to each other that we are still. Call me by my old familiar name, speak to me in the easy way which you always used. Put no difference into your tone; wear no forced air of solemnity or sorrow. Laugh as we always laughed at the little jokes we enjoyed together. Play, smile, think of me, pray for me. Let my name be ever the household word that it was. Let it be spoken without effort, without the ghost of a shadow on it. Life means all that it ever meant. It is the same as it ever was; there is absolutely unbroken continuity. What is death but a negligible accident? I am waiting for you, for an interval, somewhere very near just around the corner. All is well.
