(no subject)

I'm glad I stayed home from work today. Mom probably wouldn't have given me the news that they found my cousin Adam dead this morning, cause unknown, while I was at work. But she might have, and this restless itching beneath my skin would not be a good thing to fight off while trying to take care of other people. I'm not sad. I'm a bit odd about death that way. But I am worried about the impacts this is going to have on the living, my uncle flying in for a visit home from working in Qatar today will get off a plane to be greeted by hugs and bad news. And A? What she'll do with it is anyone's guess. She was closer to him than most of us.

The world has lost a beautiful former alcoholic, golfer, car-restorer, father of two, husband to a quiet woman with great patience, son of many foibles. I did not have much contact with my cousin, so I have not lost much today, but my family has lost a load-bearing post, and they will have to pull together or risk falling in. I will not miss him, yet he will be missed. So here's a poem for today, about how I see death. Mine or yours, I will be sad only for the things I have lost.


When Death Comes

When death comes
like the hungry bear in autumn;
when death comes and takes all the bright coins from his purse

to buy me, and snaps the purse shut;
when death comes
like the measle-pox:

when death comes
like an iceberg between the shoulder blades,

I want to step through the door full of curiosity, wondering
what is it going to be like, that cottage of darkness?

And therefore I look upon everything
as a brotherhood and a sisterhood,
and I look upon time as no more than an idea,
and I consider eternity as another possibility,

and I think of each life as a flower, as common
as a field daisy, and as singular,

and each name a comfortable music in the mouth,
tending, as all music does, toward silence,

and each body a lion of courage, and something
precious to the earth.

When it's over, I want to say: all my life
I was a bride married to amazement.
I was the bridegroom, taking the world into my arms.

When it's over, I don't want to wonder
if I have made of my life something particular, and real.
I don't want to find myself sighing and frightened,
or full of argument.

I don't want to end up simply having visited this world.

-- Mary Oliver