Ah, no!!! He has always been one of the stars at the edge of our amorphous circle here, one of those constants you look toward to know you have not lost your bearings. This passage will be like the vanishing of a constellation, unexpected, disorienting, unsettling. What prayers I have go out to his safe arrival and to his family.

I often take comfort in this piece, when losses like this one confound me, and I offer it with deep affection and respect:



Gone From My Sight

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.


by Henry Van Dyke, a 19th Century clergyman, educator, poet, and religious writer.


A.