"We do best homage to our dead when we live our lives most fully, even in the shadow of our loss. For each of our lives is worth the life of the whole world; in each one is the breath of the ultimate one."
"The Blessing of memory: It is hard to sing of oneness when our world is not complete, when those who once brought wholeness to our life have gone, and naught but memory can fill the emptiness their passing leaves behind.
In the past few years I've been to more funerals than I care to count as my parents' generation crosses the threshold into all that is unseen. One theme that runs constant at the funerals for mothers is "Mom was a good listener."
My father, who most everyone knew as Big John—a name that said as much about his hearty personality as it did about his large frame—did not leave this world without a grand sendoff.
The widow of one of my best friends calls regularly to tell me how much she misses him, and inevitably she will break down in tears. After more than two years nothing is more important to her than the assurance that she and her husband will one day be together in heaven.
In T.S. Eliot's play Murder in the Cathedral, the archbishop, Thomas Becket, preaches on Christmas morning: ". . . . Beloved, as the World sees, this is to behave in a strange fashion."
Christopher Reeve would have been content to be just a movie star. But it was his lot before he died to be a real Superman both on the screen and off.
When Bing Crosby's doctor recommended that the aging crooner limit his golf game to nine holes, he promptly went out and played 18.
General George Patton was fond of telling his troops that "No bastard ever won a war by dying for his country" but "by making the other poor dumb bastard die for his."
"We didn't lose the game," Coach Vince Lombardi once said. "We just ran out of time."
"I have not failed," Thomas Edison said at the end of his life. "I've just found 10,000 ways that won't work."
Sir Winston Churchill remarked upon drawing near to death that he was ready to meet his Maker. "Whether my Maker is prepared for the great ordeal of meeting me," he went on, "is another matter."
When told he was about to die, comedian Del Close remarked, "Thank God. I'm tired of being the funniest person in the room."
The German novelist Hermann Hesse wrote that "the call of death is a call of love. Death can be sweet if we answer it in the affirmative."
On his deathbed, when a priest asked if he renounced Satan, Voltaire answered, "Now, now my good man, this is no time for making enemies."
Nathaniel Hawthorne wrote that we are greatly relieved upon waking from a troubled dream, and that perhaps it may be the same the moment after our death.
Upon the tragic death of his beloved wife, C. S. Lewis observed that he had little patience with those who claimed that death didn't matter.
Just before Charles II, the kng of England, succumbed to a lengthy illness in 1685, he asked his subjects to forgive him for the long time he took to die.
Pope John Paul II was a champion of life and insisted that its sacred dignity be protected at every turn. But when he reached the end of his own life, he was wise enough to recognize that it was time to go.
In the difficult months of Henry Cosgrove's fight with cancer, the doctors kept trying ever more heroic procedures. It eventually became apparent to Henry that the efforts to prolong his life were only prolonging his death.
One death triggers memories of other deaths, particularly family members and close friends of the deceased and the survivors who have also died.
This powerful piece of Victorian poetry from Idylls of the King, by Tennyson, captures the last words of the dying King Arthur. It recognizes change, faith, the power of prayer, and remembrance.