Rest in Peace, Mag

Magdalene Rose Reilly
June 7, 1923 - August 2, 2006

For what is it to die,
But to stand in the sun and melt into the wind?
–Kahlil Gibran, The Prophet

Everyone must leave something behind when he dies, my grandfather said. A child or a book or a painting or a house or a wall built or a pair of shoes made. Or a garden planted. Something your hand touched some way so your soul has somewhere to go when you die, and when people look at that tree or that flower you planted, you’re there. It doesn’t matter what you do, he said, so long as you change something from the way it was before you touched it into something that’s like you after you take your hands away. –Ray Bradbury, Fahrenheit 451

We die containing a richness of lovers and tribes, tastes we have swallowed, bodies we have plunged into and swum up as if rivers of wisdom, characters we have climbed into as if trees, fears we have hidden in as if caves. –Michael Ondaatje, The English Patient

Death may be the greatest of all human blessings. –Socrates

It’s the thought of death that is horrifying; the phenomenon itself always comes as naturally as a sunset. –Peter Høeg, Smilla’s Sense of Snow

If someone is tired and has gone to lie down, we do not pursue him with shouting and bawling. She whom I have lost has lain down to sleep for a while in the Great Inner Room. To break in upon her rest with the noise of lamentation would but show that I knew nothing of nature’s Sovereign Law. That is why I ceased to mourn. –Chuang Tzu

Death is not an evil, for it liberates from all evils… –Giacomo Leopardi, Operette morali



song heard most recently before posting: Family Snapshot—Peter Gabriel