Comfort
May you find comfort in these words as you remember your beloved.
To live in this world
you must be able
to do three things:
to love what is mortal;
to hold it
against your bones knowing
your own life depends on it;
and, when the time comes to let it go,
to let it go.
-Mary Oliver
I feel like a part of my soul has loved you since the beginning of everything. Maybe we’re from the same star.
– Emery Allen
Every atom of your flesh is as dear to me as my own: in pain and sickness it would still be dear.
– Charlotte Bronte
Do I love you? My God, if your love were a grain of sand, mine would be a universe of beaches.
-William Goldman
The greatest love stories are not those in which love is only spoken, but those in which it is acted upon.
-Steve Maraboli
I adore the way he looks at me sometimes, as if love is a quantity he cannot measure scientifically, because it multiplies too quickly.
-Jodi Picoult
When someone you love dies, and you’re not expecting it, you don’t lose her all at once; you lose her in pieces over a long time – the way the mail stops coming, and her scent fades from the pillows and even from the clothes in her closet and drawers. Gradually, you accumulate the parts of her that are gone. Just when the day comes – when there’s a particular missing part that overwhelms you with the feeling that she’s gone, forever – there comes another day, and another specifically missing part.
-John Irving
He carries stars in his pockets
because he knows
she fears the dark.
Whenever sadness pays her a visit
he paints galaxies
on the back of her hands.
-Alaska Gold
Today I Was Happy, So I Made This Poem
As the plump squirrel scampers
across the roof of the corncrib,
the moon suddenly stands up in the darkness,
and I see that it is impossible to die.
Each moment of time is a mountain.
An eagle rejoices in the oak trees of heaven,
Crying,
This is what I wanted.
-James Wright
Is my soul asleep?
Have those beehives that work
in the night stopped? And the water-
wheel of thought, is it
going around now, cups
empty, carrying only shadows?
No, my soul is not asleep.
It is awake, wide awake.
It neither sleeps nor dreams, but watches,
its eyes wide open
far-off things, and listens
at the shores of the great silence.
-Machado, trans Bly
How often — will it be for always? — how often will the vast emptiness astonish me like a complete novelty and make me say, “I never realized my loss till this moment”?
– C.S. Lewis, A Grief Observed
Cats are connoisseurs of comfort.
-James Herriot
Nothing Wants to Suffer
Nothing wants to suffer. Not the wind
as it scrapes itself against the cliff. Not the cliff
being eaten, slowly, by the sea. The earth does not want
to suffer the rough tread of those who do not notice it.
The trees do not want to suffer the axe, nor see
their sisters felled by root rot, mildew, rust.
The coyote in its den. The puma stalking its prey.
These, too, want ease and a tender animal in the mouth
to take their hunger. An offering, one hopes,
made quickly, and without much suffering.
The chair mourns an angry sitter. The lamp, a scalded moth.
A table, the weight of years of argument.
We know this, though we forget.
Not the shark nor the tiger, fanged as they are.
Nor the worm, content in its windowless world
of soil and stone. Not the stone, resting in its riverbed.
The riverbed, gazing up at the stars.
Least of all, the stars, ensconced in their canopy,
looking down at all of us – their offspring –
scattered so far beyond reach.
-Danusha Laméris
I love cats because I enjoy my home, and little by little, they become its visible soul.
-Jean Cocteau
“And if I go, whilst you’re still here…know that I live on, vibrating to a different measure behind a thin veil….”
– Emily Dickinson
Morning
Salt shining behind its glass cylinder.
Milk in a blue bowl. The yellow linoleum.
The cat stretching her black body from the pillow.
The way she makes her curvaceous response to the small, kind gesture.
Then laps the bowl clean.
Then wants to go out into the world
where she leaps lightly and for no apparent reason across the lawn,
then sits, perfectly still, in the grass.
I watch her a little while, thinking:
what more could I do with wild words?
I stand in the cold kitchen, bowing down to her.
I stand in the cold kitchen, everything wonderful around me.
– Mary Oliver, New and Selected Poems
You think dogs will not be in heaven?
I tell you, they will be there long before any of us.
– Robert Louis Stevenson
“Here lies the remains of one who possessed beauty without vanity,
courage without cruelty,
and the virtues of all human beings
without any of their vices.”
– Lord Byron (1788-1824) on the death of his favorite Newfoundland dog.
“When a pet dies, that special place in our hearts feels so empty.
But we realize, as time passes,
that animals have a way of teaching us about loving,
about loyalty, friendship, & joy.
And whatever we’ve shared in their presence
can never really be lost.”
– Irving Townsend
On The Death of A Cat
In life, death
was nothing
to you: I am
willing to wager
my soul that it
simply never occurred
to your nightmareless
mind, while sleep
was everything
(see it raised
to an infinite
power and perfection). No death
in you then, so now
how even less. Dear stealth
of innocence
licked polished
to an evil
luster, little
milk fang, whiskered
night
friend
go.
– Franz Wright
I stood by your bed last night, I came to have a peep.
I could see that you were crying…you found it hard to sleep.
I whined to you softly as you brushed away a tear.
“It’s me, I haven’t left you…I’m well, I’m fine, I’m here.”
I was close to you at breakfast, I watched you pour the tea.
You were thinking of the many times, your hands reached down to me.
I was with you at the shops today, your arms were getting sore.
I longed to take your parcels, I wish I could do more.
I was with you at my grave today, you tend it with such care.
I want to reassure you that I am not lying there.
I walked with you toward the house, as you fumbled for your key,
I gently put my paw on you. I smiled and said, “It’s me.”
You looked so very tired, and sank into a chair.
I tried so hard to let you know that I was standing there.
It’s possible for me to be so near you every day.
To say to you with certainty, “I never went away.”
You sat there very quietly, then smiled, I think you knew…
In the stillness of that evening, I was very close to you.
The day is over…I smile and watch you yawning
And say, “Goodnight, God bless, I’ll see you in the morning.”
And when the time is right for you to cross the brief divide,
I’ll rush across to greet you and we will stand, side-by-side.
I have so many things to show you, there is so much for you to see. Be patient, live your journey out…then come home to be with me.
– Author Unknown
Beyond our ideas of right-doing and wrong-doing, there is a field. I’ll meet you there. When the soul lies down in that grass, the world is too full to talk about ideas, language, even the phrase ‘each other’ doesn’t make sense any more.
– Rumi
Don’t run away from grief, o soul, Look for the remedy inside the pain, because the rose came from the thorn and the ruby came from a stone.
– Rumi
My Time Has Come
“In memory of friends gone ahead”
My time has come to go home.
Let me go in peace and happiness.
I have lived a full and happy life,
You can’t imagine how much richer
Because I knew you.
Cry if you must
But be honest and realize you cry
For yourself.
You are afraid of the loneliness you will feel.
You are wrong.
You will never be alone because I am part of you
And that part will always be with you.
All you have to do is look into your heart
And we can talk and be together.
Let me go.
I am happy and fulfilled.
I am at peace and feel no pain.
I have finally come HOME.
– Toni Tyrer
Holdfast
The dead are for morticians & butchers
to touch. Only a gloved hand. Even my son
will leave a grounded wren or bat alone
like a hot stove. When he spots a monarch
in the driveway he stares. It’s dead,
I say, you can touch it. The opposite rule:
butterflies are too fragile to hold
alive, just the brush of skin could rip
a wing. He skims the orange & black whorls
with only two fingers, the way he learned
to feel the backs of starfish & horseshoe crabs
at the zoo, the way he thinks we touch
all strangers. I was sad to be born, he tells me,
because it means I will die. I once loved someone
I never touched. We played records & drank
coffee from chipped bowls, but didn’t speak
of the days pierced by radiation. A friend
said: Let her pretend. She needs one person
who doesn’t know. If I held her, I would
have left bruises, if I undressed her, I would
have seen scars, so we never touched
& she never had to say she was dying.
We should hold each other more
while we are still alive, even if it hurts.
People really die of loneliness, skin hunger
the doctors call it. In a study on love,
baby monkeys were given a choice
between a wire mother with milk
& a wool mother with none. Like them,
I would choose to starve & hold the soft body.
-Robin Beth Schaer