DEATH
…poems and funerals—they are all the same. The
arrangement of flowers and homages, casseroles and
sympathies; the arrangement of images and idioms, words
on a page—it is all the same—an effort at meaning and
metaphor, an exercise in symbol and ritualized speech,
the heightened acoustics of language raised against what
is reckoned unspeakable—faith and heartbreak, desire
and pain, love and grief, the joyous and sorrowful
mysteries by which we keep track of our lives and
times….Good poems and good funerals are stories well
told.
Thomas Lynch
from Bodies in Motion and at Rest
Personification of Death
by J. Colin Plancy
Death and Life
by Gustav Klimt
In my world death was like a nameless and incomprehensible hand, a door-to-door salesman who took
away mothers, beggars, or ninety-year-old neighbors, like a hellish lottery. But I couldn’t absorb the idea
that death could actually walk by my side, with a human face and a heart that was poisoned with hatred,
that death could be dressed in a uniform or a raincoat, queue up at a cinema, laugh in bars, or take his
children out for walk to Ciudadela Park in the morning, and then, in the afternoon, make someone
disappear in the dungeons of Montjuic Castle or in a common grave with no name or ceremony. Going
over all this in my mind, it occurred to me that perhaps the papier-mâché world that I accepted as real was
only a stage setting. Much like the arrival of Spanish trains, in those stolen years you never know when
the end of childhood was due.
from The Shadow of the Wind by Carlos Ruiz Zafon
WHEN DEATH COMES
by Mary Oliver
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.
The Poem of the Soul – Nightmare by Louis Janmot
suppose
Life is an old man carrying flowers on his head.
young death sits in a café
smiling,a piece of money held between
his thumb and first finger
i say “will he buy flowers” to you
and “Death is young
life wears velour trousers
life totters,life has a beard” i
say to you who are silent.—”Do you see
Life? He is there and here,
or that,or this
or nothing or an old man 3 thirds
asleep,on his head
flowers,always crying
to nobody something about les
roses les bluets
yes,
will He buy?
Les bells bottes—oh hear
,pas cheres”)
and my love slowly answered I think so. But
I think I see some else
there is a lady, whose name is Afterwards
she is sitting beside y oung death, is slender;
likes flowers.
e.e. cummings
by James Ensor
From THE HAT LADY
Last year when the chemicals
took my mother’s hair, she wrapped
a towel around her head. And the Hat Lady came,
a bracelet of needles on each arm,
and led her to a place
where my father and grandfather waited,
head to bare head, and Death
winked at her and tipped his cap.
Linda Pastan
In my dreams the hooded
figure of Death rode over
Barcelona, a ghostly
apparition that hovered like
haze above the towers and
roofs, trailing black ropes
that held hundreds of small
white coffins. The coffins left
behind them their own trail of
black flowers on whose
petals, written in blood, was
the name Nuria Monfort.
from The Shadow
of the Wind by
Carlos Ruiz Zafon
The Plague by Blokin
MY NUMBER
Is death miles away from this house
reaching for a widow in Cincinnati
or breathing down the neck of a lost hiker
in British Columbia?
Is he too busy making arrangements,
tampering with air brakes,
scattering cancer cells like seeds,
loosing the wooden beams of roller coasters
to bother with my hidden cottage
that visitors find so hard to find?
Or is he stepping from a black car
parked at the dark end of the lane,
shaking open the familiar cloak,
its hood raised like the head of a crow
and removing the scythe from the trunk?
Did you have any trouble with the directions?
I will ask, as I start talking my way out of this.
Billy Collins
by Hieronymus Bosch
Fear of Death or Hell
Companions of Fear by Rene Magritte
Dying is horrifying to us on
many levels. It is a fearful
prospect to suffer intense
physical pain, and since we
have all felt it, our minds recoil
from experiencing more. The
prospect of being annihilated,
of disappearing into the void
as experience comes to an
end. Creates perhaps the
deepest fear. In response,
people try to escape
awareness of mortality in all
ways we’ve become familiar
with, from substance abuse to
our culture’s endless
fascination with youth and
beauty.
Deepak Chopra
From The Deeper Wound
The Sleep of Reason by Francisco Goya
Dying is a natural
process, but our attitudes
toward it can be very
unnatural. The fear of
Death witnessed here is
rooted in deep emotional
clinging. Whatever you
resist you will fear.
Deepak Chopra
(Detail of The Damned) Sistine Chapel by Michelangelo Buonarotti
Journey’s End
How hard we try to reach death safely,
luggage intact, each child accounted for,
the wound of passage quickly bandaged up.
We treat the years like stops along the way
of a long flight from the catastrophe
we move to, thinking: home free at last.
Wave, wave your hanky towards journey’s end;
avert you eyes from windows grimed with twilight
where landscape rush by, terrible and lovely.
Linda Pastan
The Scream by Edvard Munch
DRUM
By Langston Hughes
Bear in mind
That death is a drum
Beating forever
Till the last worms come
To answer its call,
Till the last stars fall,
Until the last atom
Is no atom at all,
Until time is lost
And there is no air
And space itself
Is nothing nowhere,
Death is a drum,
A signal drum,
Calling life
To come!
Come!
Come!
The Volunteers by Kathe Kollwitz
Anticipation of Death
Lost friend, you taught me lessons
I longed to learn, and this final one I’ve learned
Against my will: the one spoken in silence,
warning us to love to love hard and deep,
Clutch dear ones tighter, ransom each day,
The horror lesson I say out of the corner of my eye
But refused to believe until now: we die.
Diane Ackerman
from WE DIE
Death Comes at the Table by Martinelli
Age is a terrible thief. Just when you’re getting the hang of
life, it knocks your legs out from under you and stoops your
back. It makes you ache and muddies your head. And
silently spreads cancer throughout your spouse….I used to
think I preferred getting old to the alternative, but now I’m
not so sure. Sometimes the monotony of bingo and singalongs and ancient dusty people parked in the hallway in
wheelchairs makes me long for death. Particularly when I
remember that I am one of the ancient dusty people, filed
away like some worthless tchotchke.
(\CHOCH-kuh\, noun:
a trinket; a knickknack.)
from Water for Elephants
by Sara Gruen
THE DEATH OF A PARENT
Move to the front
of the line
a voice says, and suddenly
there is nobody
left standing between you
and the world, to take
the first blows
on their shoulders.
This is the place in books
where part one ends, and
part two begins,
and there is no part three.
The slate is wiped
not clean but like a canvass
painted over in white
so that a whole new landscape
must be started,
bits of old
still showing underneath—
those colors sadness lends
to a certain hour of evening.
Now the line of light
at the horizon
is the hinge between earth
and heaven, only visible
a few moments
as the sun drops
its rusted padlock
into place
Linda Pastan
Self Portrait with Death by Blokin
THE DEAD
The dead are always looking down on us, they say,
while we are putting on our shoes or making a sandwich,
they are looking down through the glass-bottom boats
of heaven
as they row themselves slowly through eternity.
They watch the tops of our heads moving below on earth,
and when we lie down in a field or on a couch,
drugged perhaps by the hum of a warm afternoon,
they think we are looking back at them,
which makes them lift their oars and fall silent
and wait, like parents, for us to close our eyes.
Billy Collins
The Lady of Shalot by J. W. Waterhouse
The emptiness of the clean slate is
almost comforting.
I could sink into the softness of its
two-dimensional plane.
Its nothingness is an identity
for those who want none.
These rambling thoughts go
nowhere
like a wandering line
that touches my heart
as you did
the moment you made the decision to
stop drawing.
S. Marx
from For Justine
The Death of Marat by J.L. David
Fighting Death
Death and Woman by Kathe Kollwitz
Orpheus and Eurydice – A story about refusing to accept death. Orpheus fell in
love with a beautiful nymph and when she died he went to hell to retrieve her.
He was told not to look back. He did. She was following him, but fell back to
her fate. The moral - that we cannot cheat death.
Orpheus by Linda Pastan
When Orpheus turned
and looked back and knew
that genius wasn’t enough,
I wonder which he regretted most:
the failure of will,
Eurydice lost,
or what it must mean for her
to remain
a fraction of darkness?
by Frederick Watts
Do not go gentle into that good night,
Old age should burn and rave at close of day;
Rage, rage against the dying of the light.
Though wise men at their end know dark is right,
Because their words had forked no lightning they
Do not go gentle into that good night.
Good men, the last wave by, crying how bright
Their frail deeds might have danced in a green bay,
Rage, rage against the dying of the light.
Wild men who caught and sang the sun in flight,
And learn, too late, they grieved it on its way,
Do not go gentle into that good night.
Grave men, near death, who see with blinding sight
Blind eyes could blaze like meteors and be gay,
Rage, rage against the dying of the light.
And you, my father, there on the sad height,
Curse, bless, me now with your fierce tears, I pray.
Do not go gentle into that good night.
Rage, rage against the dying of the light.
by Dylan Thomas
Grief of Death
The night I lost
you someone
pointed me
toward the five
stages of grief.
Linda Pastan
Woman with Dead Child by Kathe Kollwitz
House of Death by William Blake
Ophelia by Millias
Ophelia - poor Ophelia! Oh, far too soft, too good, too fair, to be cast among the briers of this working-day world, and fall and
bleed upon the thorns of life! What shall be said of her? for eloquence is mute before her! Like a strain of sad, sweet music,
which comes floating by us on the wings of night and silence, and which we rather feel than hear - like the exhalation of the
violet, dying even upon the sense it charms - like the snow-flake dissolved in air before it has caught a stain of earth - like the
light surf severed from the billow, which a breath disperses; - such is the character of Ophelia: so exquisitely delicate, it seems
as if a touch would profane it; so sanctified in our thoughts by the last and worst of human woes, that we scarcely dare to
consider it too deeply. The love of Ophelia, which she never once confesses, is like a secret which we have stolen from her, and
which ought to die upon our hearts as upon her own. Her sorrow asks not words, but tears; and her madness has precisely the
same effect that would be produced by the spectacle of real insanity, if brought before us: we feel inclined to turn away, and veil
our eyes in reverential pity and too painful sympathy.
From Shakspeare's Heroines : characteristics of Women, Moral, Poetical and Historical - By Mrs. Jameson (First published in 1832)
Reality of Death
OCTOBER FUNERAL
for Ag
The world is shedding
its thousand skins.
The snake goes naked,
and the needles of the pine fall out
like the teeth of a comb I broke
upon your hair last week.
The ghost of dead leaves
haunt no one. Impossible
to give you to the weather,
to leave you locked in a killed tree.
No metaphysic has prepared us
for the simple act of turning
and walking away.
Linda Pastan
Flavour of Tears by Rene Magritte
Battlefield by Kathe Kollwitz
Memorials of Death
In almost every culture those who mourn the
departed hold onto them through memory.
Pyramids at Giza
Taj Mahal
Tomb of Lorenzo de Medici by Michelangelo
Tomb in England
War memorials
are about us as
a present
society, our
views of the
past, what we
hold dear; what
and how we
want our
children to
remember the
past.
Tomb of the Unknown Soldier Washington D.C.
Memorials at Gettysburg
Gettysburg
WWII Memorial
WWII Memorial
Korean War Memorial
Vietnam Wall Memorial
Memorial Services
We confront
the inevitable
with rituals that
comfort us by
defining the
boundaries
between life
and death.
By the Deathbed by Edvard Munch
Rituals help us vent grief, say farewell,
and start life’s routines again.
Rituals of
death are not
just for the
living they
also aide the
dead through
a voyage to a
new place,
while assuring
the living that
death doesn’t
really kill.
Knight, Death and Devil by Albrecht Durer
His fingers were stiff, and it took him
a long time to twist the lid off the holy
water. Drops of water fell on the red
blanket and soaked into dark icy
spots. He sprinkled the grave and the
water disappeared almost before it
touched the dim, cold sand; it
reminded him of something – he tried
to remember what it was, because he
thought if he could remember he
might understand this. He sprinkled
more water; he shook the container
until it was empty, and the water fell
through the light from sundown like
August rain that fell while the sun was
still shining, almost evaporating
before it touched the wilted squash
flowers.
Leslie Marmon Silko
from The Man to Send
Rain Clouds
The Passon of Sacco by Ben Shahn
Celebrations
The Burial of Count Orgaz by El Greco
from I Praise My Destroyer by Diane
Ackerman
I praise life’s bright catastrophes,
and all the ceremonies of grief.
I praise our real estate—
a shadow and a grave.
I praise my destroyer,
and will continue praising
until hours run like mercury
through my fingers, hope flares a final
time
in the last throes of innocence,
and all the coins of sense are spent.
Burial of the Sardine by Francisco Goya
WHEN I DIE by Blood, Sweat and Tears
written by Laura Nyro
I’m not scared of dying
and I don’t really care
if it’s peace you find in dying,
well then, let the time be near…
And when I die, and when I’m gone
there’ll be, one child born
in this world
to carry on, to carry on …
New Orleans Jazz Funeral
Death and the Grave
FOR WHOM THE BELL TOLLS
by John Donne
No man is an island,
Entire of itself.
Each is a piece of the continent,
A part of the main.
If a clod be washed away by the sea,
Europe is the less.
As well as if a promontory were.
As well as if a manner of thine own
Or of thine friend's were.
Each man's death diminishes me,
For I am involved in mankind.
Therefore, send not to know
For whom the bell tolls,
It tolls for thee.
by Albien Egger-lienz
“When the earth becomes
a goddess of Death, it is
simply because she is felt
to be the Universal Womb,
the inexhaustible source of
all creation.”
-Mircea Eliade
O Grave, Where is Thy Victory by Jan Toorop
ELEGY by Linda Pastan
Last night the moon lifted itself
on one wing
over the fields
and struggling to rise
this morning
like a hooked fish
through watery
layers
of sleep,
I know
with what difficulty
flowers
must pull themselves
all the way up
their stems.
How much easier
the free fall of snow
or leaves in their season.
All week, watching
the hospital gown
rising
and falling
with your raggedy breath,
I dreamed
not of resurrections
but of the slow, sensual
slide each night
The Garden of Death by Hugo Simberg
into sleep, of dust
or newly shoveled earth
settling.
Beyond the Grave
False Mirror by Rene Magritte
The Ascent to Heaven by Heironymus Bosch
The Empyrean by Gustave Dore
Saturn by Gustave Dore
A stairway I beheld to such height / Uplifted, that mine eye pursued it not
Dante’s Divine Comedy
Eucharist, mass, or communion: In
this sacrament most Christians agree
that they point directly to Jesus'
sacrificial and redemptive death
without which humanity would have no
hope for ultimate salvation.
Descent from the Cross by Rembrandt
Orthodox Christianity believes that Jesus rose from
the dead three days after his crucifixion and then,
shortly afterward, ascended to heaven. The
resurrection is a powerful symbol for the ultimate
victory over both death and sin in that believers can
look forward to the day when they, too, will be
resurrected to live with God and Christ forever.
The Last Judgment by Michelangelo
"We have ordained death among you, and We are not to be overcome,
so that We may change your state and make you grow into what you
know not." Qur’an 56:60-61
“But those who believe and do good deeds, We will admit them to
gardens (paradise) in which rivers flow, lasting in them forever…”
Qur’an, 4:57
"O soul who is at rest, return to thy Lord, well-pleased (with Him), wellpleasing (Him). So enter among My servants, and enter My garden."
Qur’an 89:27-30
"It (hell) is the fire kindled by Allah which rises over the hearts."
Qur’an 104:5-6
We are all terminal. From the moment we are born, we are
destined to die. Our happiness is bound up in our ability to
accept death as a fact of life. Acceptance of our mortal end
is not something which comes easily. Such growth takes
work. None of us have time to lose in accepting this reality.
Rabbi Kenneth Cohen
Jewish tradition is organized around eight major Jewish value concepts which can
serve as the unifying principles for examination of death and bereavement.
1)
2)
3)
4)
5)
6)
7)
8)
the reality of death
respect for the dead
equality
simplicity
the venting of emotions openly and fully
communal responsibility and support
affirmation of life (accompanied by a general trust in the world and in its Creator)
remembrance
Buddhist practice greatly
emphasizes importance of
the awareness of death
and impermanence....
Sometimes when I think
about death I have a
feeling of curiosity and this
makes it much easier
for me to accept death.
His Holiness the Dali Lama
Tibetan Wheel of Life
It gives comfort to read in the
Upanishads that our lives are like
ripples in the vast ocean of
consciousness; like waves we
rise and fall, yet we never
disappear, for the ocean is infinite
and eternal, and a wave is
nothing but that ocean. It is
equally comforting to read the
scientific equivalent of the same
statement, which holds that
everything in existence is a wave
of energy, and even though the
wave function may collapse to
form an electron whose life is
infinite, eternal, unmoving, and
undying.
Deepak Chopra
from The Deeper Wound
The Human Condition, by Rene Magritte
The Therapist by Rene Magritte
Death as a fact becomes less brutal if
you can accept that it is a necessary
part of life. The universe recycles
everything in the never-ending flow of
time. The atoms that make up your
body have found a temporary shelter
only. Like birds of passage they are
always in flight. With your next breath
you will take in several billion
molecules of air once breathed by
Buddha or Jesus, and when you
exhale you will send molecules of air to
be breathed tomorrow by people in
China. Every atom of your body is
borrowed and must be repaid to the
cosmos. The reason that the ancient
Indians worshiped Shiva, the god of
death and dissolution, wasn’t out of
fear alone, or a desire to placate him.
The traditions of wisdom looked at
nature and say in its design creation
and dissolution, the one inseparable
from the other. At the deepest level,
everyone is borrowing and repaying all
the time. The scene isn’t one of
perpetual death but of life circulating
within itself.
Deepak Chopra
from The Deeper Wound
Imagine that inside you is
a space nothing can
touch. Your body is like a
house that gives shape to
this space of peace an d
silence. When a house
falls down, when its roof
and walls collapse, no
harm is done to that
space inside. Only the
boundaries have
disappeared. In death we
lose our bodily definition,
but the space of inner
peace, which some call
the soul, is never harmed.
Deepak Chopra
The Liberator by Rene Magritte
“Everyone knows they’re going to die,” he said again “but
nobody believes it. If we did, we would do things differently.”
So we kid ourselves about death, I said.
“Yes. But there is a better approach. To know you are going to
die, and be prepared for it at any given time. That’s better. That way
you can actually be more involved in your life while you’re living.”
But everyone knows someone who has died, I said. Why is it
so hard to think about dying?
“Because, Morrie continued, “most of us all walk around as if
we’re sleepwalking. We really don’t experience the world fully,
because we’re half-asleep, doing things we automatically think we
have to do.”
And facing death changes all that?
“Oh, yes. You strip away all that stuff and you focus on the
essentials.
From Tuesday’s with Morrie
by Mitch Albom