Friday
This past week in Slovenia has been a time for remembering the dead. Tuesday was the official Remembrance of the Dead day, a day when family visit the graveyards and clean the stones, but many had the entire week off.
As I talked to friends about the occasion, I thought of Mary Elizabeth’s Frye’s “Do Not Stand at My Grave and Weep”:
Do not stand at my grave and weep
I am not there; I do not sleep.
I am a thousand winds that blow,
I am the diamond glints on snow,
I am the sun on ripened grain,
I am the gentle autumn rain.
When you awaken in the morning’s hush
I am the swift uplifting rush
Of quiet birds in circled flight.
I am the soft stars that shine at night.
Do not stand at my grave and cry,
I am not there; I did not die.
The sentiments remind me of the inscription Julia and I put on our oldest son’s gravestone. It’s from Adonais, Percy Shelley’s elegy to John Keats:
He is made one with Nature: there is heard
His voice in all her music, from the moan
Of thunder, to the song of night’s sweet bird;
He is a presence to be felt and known
In darkness and in light, from herb and stone…
I think also of how Will and Lyra free the dead in Philip Pullman’s fantasy novel Amber Spyglass. I wish I had the book with me so I could share the ecstatic moment when the dead emerge from their dark sterile existence and, with cries of joy, merge with nature. The internet, however, gave me the passage explaining what will happen:
“This is what’ll happen,” she said, “and it’s true, perfectly true. When you go out of here, all the particles that make you up will loosen and float apart, just like your daemons did. If you’ve seen people dying, you know what that looks like. But your daemons en’t just nothing now; they’re part of everything. All the atoms that were them, they’ve gone into the air and the wind and the trees and the earth and all the living things. They’ll never vanish. They’re just part of everything. And that’s exactly what’ll happen to you, I swear to you, I promise on my honor. You’ll drift apart, it’s true, but you’ll be out in the open, part of everything alive again.”
As I recall the book, there are orthodox souls in the land of the dead who are so hung up on the idea of heaven as a fixed place that they choose to remain in the dark. It’s a version of Dante’s Inferno, where the close-minded find themselves trapped for eternity in those closed minds.
For the others, however, death is a new entry into existence.