On Dying

“There is no death! What seems so is transition;

This life of mortal breath

Is but a suburb of The Life Elysian,

Whose portal we call Death” Longfellow.

Within the cloak-room of earth, flesh adorns a naked soul in a treacherous robe, a mantle of hypocrisy - twin bodies inaugurated in accord with their tomb.

A sweep of days in their uterine entombment blows like winds of time fleeting, with an unconscious tenderness, told through days of calamity; when birds of prey sharpened beaks by feasting on mass graves.

The soul, with whom death has claimed an enforced kinship, in his absence from the body, is but a shadow and a glowing bulb of flesh floating in a series of mirages in a well of life.

And if death has been swallowed up by life, let me ask you, my unknown but sorrowing friend, to lay with me for a while beside his tomb with our faces toward daybreak.

I know whereof I speak my friend - life is but a secret passage of impermanence and what lies beyond impermanence and death is but a crowning final boundless freedom.

Anyone who stares into the face of death could have a kind of confidence in lives meant to prepare for death.

We are but travelers, taking temporary refuge in this life and this body.

These eloquent silences of the soul speak to the sympathetic listener with more inspiration than ecclesiastical utterances, telling of flesh’s crushed old affections, incredulous hopes, staggering commonsense love and of the afterlife so inexpressibly different to our expectations.

Know also the weakness as well as the yearning of the flesh to know that the things in the silence of death are true.

In the blackness of a mourner’s despair gropes the soul for the touch of a vanished hand, his ears strained for the sound of the voice that is still.