March 31, 2003

• SAILING AND DYING
  
  My cousin has been writing poetry. It’s full of angst, but I think it’s good stuff. So, because I am a copycat, I’m posting some prose I found in a brochure in the hospital I work in. It was a brochure next to the chart of a patient who might die soon.
  
  

  
  

  
    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.
  
                      Henry Van Dyke
  
  

  
  
  

  • 7:35 am
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