Spiritual Sunday
Yesterday we buried my mother’s ashes in the Turner, Maine cemetery, where we still have the cottage that my great grandmother Sarah Ricker built. Siblings, cousins, and spouses gathered, and by daughter-in-law Betsy sang “It Is Well with My Soul” and “Precious Lord.” In August we will have a public memorial in Sewanee, the community to which my mother devoted her life, but this one was just family.
Few poems are more cited at such occasions than Christina Rossetti’s “Let Me Go.” There’s a reason for this. “Why cry for a soul set free?” she asks, and I think of how, at the end, my mother wanted to die. Rossetti writes to console those who have not yet begun “the journey we all must take”—and, of course, to console herself as well.
She leaves us imagining our loved one as “dreaming through the twilight/ That doth not rise nor set.” And then provides us with this excellent advice:
When you are lonely and sick at heart
Go the friends we know.
Laugh at all the things we used to do
Miss me, but let me go.
There was much laughter following the burial. As was only right.
Let Me Go
By Christinia Rossetti
When I come to the end of the road
And the sun has set for me
I want no rites in a gloom filled room
Why cry for a soul set free?
Miss me a little, but not for long
And not with your head bowed low
Remember the love that once we shared
Miss me, but let me go.
For this is a journey we all must take
And each must go alone.
It’s all part of the master plan
A step on the road to home.
When you are lonely and sick at heart
Go the friends we know.
Laugh at all the things we used to do
Miss me, but let me go.
When I am dead my dearest
Sing no sad songs for me
Plant thou no roses at my head
Nor shady cypress tree
Be the green grass above me
With showers and dewdrops wet
And if thou wilt remember
And if thou wilt, forget.
I shall not see the shadows,
I shall not fear the rain;
I shall not hear the nightingale
Sing on as if in pain;
And dreaming through the twilight
That doth not rise nor set,
Haply I may remember,
And haply may forget.