I while back I read a book that had some things that brought me comfort and cause to reflect. Among the passages were these words which may be of similar use for someone out there today.
From “The Undertaking: Life Studies in the Dismal Trade” a fine book by American poet and mortician Thomas Lynch:
“What I was trying to tell the fellow was, of course, being a dead saint is no more worthwhile than being a dead philodendron or a dead angelfish. Living is the rub, and always has been. Living saints still feel the flames and stigmata of this vale of tears, the ache of chastity and the pangs of conscience. Once dead, they let their relics do the legwork, because, as I was trying to tell this priest, the dead don’t care.
Only the living care.
And I am sorry to be repeating myself, but this is the central fact of my business–that there is nothing, once you are dead, that can be done to you or for you or with you or about you that will do you any good or any harm; that any damage or decency we do accrues to the living, to whom your death happens, if it really happens to anyone. The living have to live with it. You don’t. Theirs is the grief or gladness your death brings. Theirs is the loss or gain of it. Theirs is the pain and the pleasure of memory. Theirs is the invoice for services rendered and theirs is the check in the mail for its payment.
…
Give it a rest is the thing I say.
Once you are dead, put your feet up, call it a day, and let the husband or the missus or the kids or a sibling decide whether you are to be buried or burned or blown out of a cannon or left to dry out in a ditch somewhere. It’s not your day to watch it, because the dead don’t care.
…
Which is not to say that the dead do not matter.
They do. They do. Of course they do.”
