REFLECTIONS ON DEATH

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Death--the last voyage, the longest and the best .
(Thomas Wolfe)

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Seeing death as the end of life is like seeing the horizon as the end of the ocean.
(David Searls )

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Life is a great sunrise. I do not see why death should not be an even greater one.
(Vladimir Nabokov )

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And wrap around my frame a robe of fire,
And let it rise as incense censor flung,
Until in ether pure, it may inspire
To greet the stars along the azure flung.
(United States Cremation Corporation ~ circa 1933)

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Show me your cemeteries, and I will tell you what kind of people you have.
(Benjamin Franklin)

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Live as if you were to die tomorrow.  Learn as if you were to live forever.
(Unknown, though often misattributed to Mahatma Gandhi)

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I know this orbit of mine cannot be swept by a carpenter's compass.
All goes outward and nothing collapses,
And to die is different than anyone supposed...and luckier.
(Walt Whitman)

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I love you Sarah. For all eternity, I love you.
(Last words of James K. Polk, US President. Spoken to his wife)

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Now comes the mystery.
(Last words of  Henry Ward Beecher ~ evangelist)

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Josephine...
(Last word of Napoleon Bonaparte)

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Give me my Romeo, and when he shall die
Take him and cut him out in little stars,
And he will make the face of heaven so fine,
That all the world will be in love with night,
And pay no worship to the garish sun.
(Shakespeare’s Romeo and Juliet III. ii)

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Beautiful.   
(Last word of Elizabeth Barrett Browning. Given In reply to her husband who had asked how she felt)

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While I thought that I was learning how to live, I have been learning how to die. 
(Leonardo Da Vinci)

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. . . the fog is rising.
(Last words of Emily Dickinson)

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I see that you have made three spelling mistakes.
(Last words of The Marquis de Favras.  The Marquis was  condemned to death for attempting to help Louis XVI escape during the French Revolution.  The court clerk handed him the written death sentence as he ascended the stairs to the scaffold)

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I am not the least afraid to die.
(Last words of Charles Darwin)

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It is very beautiful over there.
(Last words of Thomas Alva Edison)

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I am about to take my last voyage, a great leap in the dark.
(Last words of Thomas Hobbes)

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I see black light.
(Last words of Victor Hugo)

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It's all been very interesting.
(Last words of writer, Lady Mary Wortley Montagu)

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Why fear death?  Death is only a beautiful adventure.
(Last words of Charles Frohman, theatrical manager.  Died aboard  HMS Lusitania, which was sunk by a German submarine in 1915. Frohman was heard shouting these words of encouragement to fellow passengers who awaited their watery demise.  He was drawing from  a line in Peter Pan:  "To die will be an awfully big adventure."

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Wonderful, wonderful this death.
(Last words of artist William Etty)

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Farewell, my friends.  I go to glory.
(Said to be the Last words of Isadora Duncan. Most certainly apocryphal as she was strangled to death by her own scarf...killed almost instantly as the material tangled in the wheel of the Bugatti in which she was riding. Unless, being a dramatic statement uttered as she left in the car, not knowing her fate)

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Death is as sure for that which is born as birth is for that which is dead; therefore, grieve not for what is inevitable.
(Bhagavada Gita)

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Death is a law and not a punishment.  Three things ought to console us for giving up life; the friends whom we have lost, the few persons worthy of being loved whom we leave behind us, and finally the memory of our stupidities and the assurance that they are now going to stop.
(John Baptiste Dubois, French Diplomat)

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And as I move through an obscure and poppied world, behold a shrouded form that seems to question me! Is this the dead Destroyer, Death? Is this the end? Ah no! The pallid arms are raised, the veil divides, a faint sigh breathes my name, and lo, not night but dawn; not death, but life... or better, life through death.  Yea, Death the Bride!
(Thomas Gotch)

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We say that the hour of death cannot be forecast, but when we say this we imagine that hour as placed in an obscure and distant future.  It never occurs to us that it has any connection with the day already begun or that death could arrive this same afternoon, this afternoon which is so certain and which has every hour filled in advance.
(Marcel Proust)

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Death is not extinguishing the light; it is only putting out the lamp because the dawn has come.
(Rabindranath Tagore, Poet, Playwright & Essayist)

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The carriage is coming for me.  Oh, how easy!  How easy!
(Last words of Mrs. Mary Hunter, 26 year old housewife, January, 1801)

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The best is yet to be,
The last of life, for which the first was made.
(Robert Browning)

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Death...the last sleep?  No, it is the final awakening.
(Sir Walter Scott)

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There is a certain frame of mind to which a cemetery is, if not an antidote, at last an alleviation.  If you are in a fit of the blues, go nowhere else.
(Robert Louis Stevenson, Immortelles)

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Life without death is meaningless...a picture without a frame.
(John A. Wheeler)

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Every passage has its beacon. Every shadow has its light. We must therefore keep watch, my friend, keep watch.
(Captain Brenner Tate)

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For what is it to die but to stand naked in the wind and to melt into the sun? And what is it to cease breathing, but to free the breath from its restless tides, that it may rise and expand and seek God unencumbered?
(Gibran)

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Let children walk with Nature, let them see the beautiful blendings and communions of death and life, their joyous inseparable unity, as taught in woods and meadows, plains and mountains and streams of our blessed star, and they will learn that death is stingless indeed, and as beautiful as life.
(John Muir)

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In the depth of your hopes and desires lies your silent knowledge of the beyond; and like seeds dreaming beneath the snow your heart dreams of spring. Trust the dreams, for in them is hidden eternity.
(Gibran)

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He has outsoar'd the shadow of our night;
Envy and calumny and hate and pain,
And that unrest which men miscall delight
Can touch him not and torture not again;
From the contagion of the world's slow stain
He is secure, and now can never mourn
A heart grown cold, a head grown gray in vain...
(Percy Bysshe Shelley)

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The gods conceal from men the happiness of death, that they may endure life.
(Lucan)

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Death is no more than passing from one room into another. But there's a difference for me, you know. Because in that other room I shall be able to see.                                                                               (Helen Keller)

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Sorrow is of the earth.  The life of the spirit is joy.
(Evelyn De Morgan)

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Death seemed beautiful in her face.
(Petrarch. Inscription on the tomb of  young Ines Rappa - Cimitero Urbano,Lucca, Italy)

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On the day when death will knock at thy door what wilt thou offer to him?
Oh, I will set before my guest the full vessel of my life--
I will never let him go with empty hands.

All the sweet vintage of all my autumn days and summer nights,
all the earnings and gleanings of my busy life will I place
before him at the close of my days when death will knock at my door.

O thou the last fulfilment of life, Death, my death, come and whisper to me!
(Rabindranath Tagore - “Song Offerings”)

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So live that when thy summons comes to join
The innumerable caravan that moves
To the pale realms of shade where each shall take
His chamber in the silent halls of death,
Thou go not, like the quarry-slave at night,
Scourged to his dungeon, but sustain'd and sooth'd
By an unfaltering trust approach thy grave
Like one who wraps the drapery of his couch
About him, and lies down to pleasant dreams.
(William Cullen Bryant - “Thanatopsis”)

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Death is mild and terrorless as the serenest night.
Here could I hope, like some enquiring child
Sporting on graves, that death did hide from human sight
Sweet secrets, or beside its breathless sleep
That loveliest dreams perpetual watch did keep.
(Percy Bysshe Shelley, "A Summer Evening Churchyard, Lechlade, Gloucestershire”)

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It was splendid, delightful, it was pleasing and calm. I heard a voice that no one in the world has ever heard. And I died....
(Unknown)

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Is there any wonder that, deeper than idea and concept, is the insistent conviction that the night can never stay, that winter is ever moving toward the spring?  Thus, when a man sees the lights go out one by one, when he sees the end of his days marked by death -- his death -- he senses, rather than knows, that even the night into which he is entering will be followed by day.
(Howard Thurman)

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Love is the emblem of eternity; it confounds all notion of time; effaces all memory of a beginning, all fear of an end.
(Anne Louise Germaine De Stael)

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To that high Capital, where kingly Death
Keeps his pale court in beauty and decay,
He came; and bought, with price of purest breath,
A grave among the eternal.  Come away!
Haste, while the vault of blue Italian day
Is yet his fitting charnel-roof!  While still
He lies, as if in dewy sleep he lay;
Awake him not!  Surely he takes his fill
Of deep and liquid rest, forgetful of all ill.
(Percy Bysshe Shelley, “Adonais”)

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O Death the Healer, scorn thou not, I pray, to come to me.
Of cureless ills thou art  the one physician.
Pain lays not its touch upon a corpse.
(Aeschylus)

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Come lovely and soothing death,
Undulate round the world, serenely arriving, arriving,
In the day, in the night, to all, to each,
Sooner or later, delicate death.
(Walt Whitman)

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My soul is full of whispered song;
My blindness is my sight;
The shadows that I feared so long
Are all alive with light.
(Alice Cary, Dying Hymn)

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For death,
Now I know, is that first breath
Which our souls draw when we enter
Life, which is of all life center.
(Edwin Arnold)

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Paradise -
I see flowers
from the cottage where I lie.
(Yaitsu’s death poem, 1807)

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As a well-spent day brings happy sleep, so a life well used brings happy death.
(Leonardo da Vinci)

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Now he has departed from this strange world a little ahead of me.  That signifies nothing.  For us believing physicists the distinction between past, present, and future is only a stubbornly persistent illusion.
(Albert Einstein)

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Perhaps passing through the gates of death is like passing quietly through the gate in a pasture fence. On the other side, you keep walking, without the need to look back. No shock, no drama, just the lifting of a plank or two in a simple wooden gate in a clearing. Neither pain, nor floods of light, nor great voices, but just the silent crossing of a meadow.
(Mark Helprin, "A Soldier of the Great War”)

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To fear death, gentlemen, is nothing less than to think oneself wise when one is not, to think one knows what one does not know.  No one knows whether death may not be the greatest of all blessings for a man, yet men fear it as if they know that it is the greatest of evils.  Surely it is the most blameworthy ignorance to believe that one knows what one does not know.
(Plato, "The Apology, Socrates”)

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there's a hell of a good universe next door; let's go.
(e.e. cummings, "pity this busy monster, manunkind”)

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Is everybody happy? I want everybody to be happy. I know I'm happy.
(Last words of Ethel Barrymore, actress, Died 18 June, 1959)

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Death is an angel with two faces:
To us he turns
A face of terror, blighting all things fair;
The other burns
With glory of the stores, and love is there.
(Theodore Chickering Williams - A Thanatopsis)

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