Music: You'll Never Walk Alone, by Rogers & Hammerstein
This analogy by Henry Van Dyke is from a booklet given to me when my father was in hospice. It is very comforting to me. I post it here in hopes it may comfort you too.
I am standing upon the seashore. A ship at my side spreads her white sails to the morning breeze and starts for the blue ocean. She is an object of beauty and strength. I stand and watch her until at length she hangs like a speck of white cloud just where the sea and sky come to mingle with each other.
Then someone at my side says: "There, she is gone!"
"Gone where?"
Gone from my sight. That is all. She is just as large in mast and hull and spar as she was when she left my side and she is just as able to bear her load of living freight to her destined port.
Her diminished size is in me, not in her. And just at the moment when someone at my side says: "There, she is gone!" there are other eyes watching her coming, and other voices ready to take up the glad shout: "Here she comes!"
And that is dying.
Posted December 11, 1998, in loving tribute to my parents.
"Gone From My Site" is printed in a booklet I found helpful in my father's final weeks. It is titled: "GONE FROM MY SIGHT The Dying Experience",
by Barbara Karnes, RN,
P.O. Box 335 Stilwell, Kansas 66085. KAT's Meow is not associated with her or the booklet's publication in any way.
Midi file, "You'll Never Walk Alone", courtesy Midi Go Round
