Take Time to Remember

Take some time to remember people after they are dead.


It is good for you, stretching a muscle of emotion that has grown stiff from stillness. Remembering brings air to someplace stale and stifled, a secret storeroom behind a door, closed and locked.

How could it hurt us to touch again an old pain, a yearning that was once, and can still be, overwhelming? How could it hurt us to weep once more?

It is good to teach children to remember those who have died. Perhaps a generation which grows up going to an All Soul's service once a year at church will not deny the reality of death, as their parents and grandparents have.

Remembering and mourning raises the thread count of the human fabric.

As we prepare for the All Souls Service this Sunday, I remember this poem.

It is by the poet, Bill Coyle, in memory of another poet Sten Soderstrom.


"Leave Taking"


The dead, they say, are the departed. They
Pass on, they pass away, they leave behind
Family, friends, the whole of humankind -
They have gone on before. Or so they say.


But could it be the opposite is true?
Now, as I stand here in the graveled drive
At moonrise, unaccountably alive,
I have the sense that it is we, not you


Who are departing, spun at breakneck speed
Through space and time, while you stay where you are
Intimate of dark matter and bright star -
And watch the brilliant, faithless world recede.