Silent Cries

There are times in my life when my heart
cries our so loud for you
That I cringe,
Wondering what others might think
And then I realize
That only I can hear the screams.
They are a part of me,
Like the blood rushing through my veins,
And the breath leaving my lungs.

From Love Never Dies by Sandy Goodman

Samuel Clemens (author Mark Twain, who wrote Huckleberry Finn and Tom Sawyer) was in England when he was handed a telegram stating that his 24 year old daughter, Susy, had died.  Ten years after her death he wrote the following in The Autobiography of Mark Twain concerning the impact of Susy's death on him.  



How Do We Hear This and Live?

"It is one of the mysteries of our nature that a man, all unprepared, can receive a thunder-stroke like that and live.  There is but one reasonable explanation of it.  The intellect is stunned by the shock and but gropingly gathers the meaning of the words.  The power to realize their full impact is mercifully waiting.  The mind has a dumb sense of vast lost - that is all.  It will take mind and memory months and possibly years to gather together the details and thus learn and know the full extent of the loss.  A man's house burns down.  The smoking wreckage represents only a ruined home that was dear through years of use and pleasant associations.  By and by, as the days and weeks go on, first he misses this, then that, then some other thing.  And when he casts about for it he finds that it was in that house.  Always it is an essential - there was but one of its kind.  It cannot be replaced."


                              

How Long A Night Can Last.

Have you any idea
How long a night can last, spent
Lying alone and sobbing?


From One Hundred Poems from the Japanese 

Japanese Commaner Michitsuna's mother wrote this poem after her son's death.

"Ever since Walt died, "wrote T.S. Garp, 
"my life has felt like an epilogue."

from The World According to Garp by T. S. Garp

In this quote Albert Camus uses imagery of the seasons to explain how he learned to "meet both joy and sorrow with equanimity:

"In the depths of winter, I finally learned that within me there lay an invincible summer."

               From Return to Tipasa by author Albert Camus
                                    
                                  

"Death is the end of a lifetime, not the end of a 
relationship."
 
by Mitch Albom, Author


       
                                                       

"Life is eternal, 
and love is immortal, 
and death is only a horizon, 
and  a horizon is nothing 
save the limits of our sight."

by Rossiter Worthington Raymond      


  
                                                                                                         

For What is it to Die?



For what is it to die,
but to stand in the sun and melt into the wind?
And when the Earth has claimed our limbs,
then we shall truly dance.

from The Prophet by Kahlil Gibran

"In this sad world of ours,
sorrow comes to all,
and it often comes with bitter agony.
Perfect relief is not possible,
except with time.
You cannot now believe that 
you will ever feel better.
But this is not true.
You are sure to be happy again.
knowing this, 
truly believing it,
will make you less miserable now.
I have had enough experience to make this statement."

by Abraham Lincoln, Former American President, had three children die.

 
 

 "The deaths of our children confound us.  The foundation blocks  of living have been upset.  As time passes, we start putting together the crumbled wall, trying to find in life enough rationally that action, even the act of living, makes sense.  But the assault is too fast: do not rely on fairness or right, we are reminded over and over.  When Solomon speaks to his son in Proverbs, he promises that a righteous life will be a long life; it turns out that is not true.  The story of Cain and Abel is the truth:  no one will step in and protect the pure from death.  And if that was not enough, we learn we cannot rebuild the wall even with mercy and grace, for too many of the blocks are now missing.  I am so very tired.

I used to think that the greatest gift you could give a child was the sense that anything was possible.  You tempt death as you sleep, as you drive on a clear day, as you walk, as you dance.  Maybe this is all naive.  Maybe the cocoon never was there.  Instead it is like the public service announcements on breast cancer, I wrote eight years before finding out I had breast cancer.  One, two, three, four, five, six, seven, your get breast cancer.

Tomorrow I substitute-teach at our high school.  I will try not to look at them as targets of irrational tragedy: they will try not to look at me as the symbol of a dead child." 

From Saving Graces by Elizabeth Edwards, whose 16 year old son, Wade, was killed in an automobile accident.    


              

                                                            

Picture made early 2002
Top - Joe
Middle L to R - Kelly, Mom, Krystal, Tyler 
Bottom L to R - Detrall, Karen, Steven


"I am not resigned to shutting away loving hearts in cold ground.
Down, down, down to the darkness of the grave,
gently they go,
the beautiful,
the tender,
the kind;
Quietly they go,
the intelligent,
the witty,
the brave.
I know.
But I do not approve.
And I am not resigned."

by Edna St. Vincent Millay, Poet

"In grief nothing stays put.  One keeps emerging from a phrase, but it always recurs.  Round and round.  Everything repeats.  Am I going in circles, or dare I hope I am on a spiral?  Grief is like a long valley, a winding valley where any bend many reveal a totall new landscape."

by C. S. Lewis, British Author






                                                                                       

"Give sorrow words.
The grief that does not speak whispers 
the o'erfraught heart and bids it break."

From MacBeth by William Shakespeare

L to R - Krystal sitting and Kina standing in canoe,
Karen on left hugging Krystal,
Krystal, Beautiful Bride, kissing Kelly. 

"There's only one thing worse 
than speaking ill of the dead -
 and that is not speaking of the dead at all."

Anonymous

Oh Call My Sister Back To Me!


L to R - Kina, Krystal, Kelly, Karen




"Oh call my sister back to me!
 I cannot play alone:
The summer comes with flower and bee-
Where is my sister gone?"

by Felicia Dorothea Hemans