It’s Memorial Day and we think of those who once were a great part of our lives and are now in God’s Next Room. And right with those thoughts come the thoughts that it’s a Pathway that every one of us will someday take.

Some of you will remember LaRee Pehrson who contributed so much to the ‘Ole Green Sheet’ newspapers from Magna, and who gifted me with a book on thoughts of death, and they are so good that on this day, I’m sharing some of them with you. And those of us who think our thoughts of Death come mostly in the A.D. period  of time, just might be surprised at what The Ancients thought about it all, too.

So———–fasten your seat belts and come along with me:

“Birth and Death are one, in exactly the same way  that the river and the sea are one.”     Kahill Gibran 1934

“In reality there is no birth or is there Death,   it is simply being at one time visible,  and at another time, invisible.   “Apollonius of Tyana 70 A. D.

Thoreau , less then two months before his death, said he was enjoying life, which was different, but his life  had changed several times before, and he had  enjoyed every change, and had no regrets. . A member of his family asked him if he had made his peace with God, and only Thoreau could have answered as he did.  That he was not aware that he and God had ever quarreled.

Look upon Death as Going Home.   Chinese Proverb

I cannot think of Death as being anything more than stepping from one room into another.   William Blake   1826

To die is when we begin to really live.    Sophocles, 495 B.C, at the time of his execution.  (And why was he executed?  For his bold thinking?)

I stand at the seashore, where a ship spreads her white sails to the breeze and moves into the wide ocean, an object of beauty and strength.   I stay and watch until she is only a ribbon of white cloud where the sea and sky come to mingle, and I sigh, ”Oh, my! She is gone!”       But someone at my side asks,  Gone where? Gone only from our sight, for she is just as large in mast, spar and hull as when she left our side, and just as able to bear her load to the place of destination. All diminishment in size is in us, not her.    And just at the moment when you say “Oh, look, she is gone”, other voices, on the other side,  are taking up the glad shout of, “Oh, look.  Here she comes”.  And that is what we call dying.  Anonymous

Death, to a philosopher is the final fulfillment, much to be desired, because it opens the door to true knowledge.   The Soul, freed from its bonds to the body, at last achieves undimmed and celestial vision.   Socrates, on his last day of life.

We are not snuffed out at Death, but absorbed into a greater Flame.     Anne Morrow Lindbergh   1973

When you were born, you cried, but your whole world rejoiced. Live so that when you die, your world will cry, but you will rejoice.  Writer unknown but came to me through Dr. Ushurbad Arya. Bless him, for he gave so much, and  to so many.

“Here lies food for worms only, But the work shall not be lost, for it will, as he believed, appear again in a new and more elegant edition, revised and corrected by the Author.”  Benjamin Franklin, epitaph.   Written at age 22,  and decades later, his own words were engraved upon his gravestone.

Michelangelo did some of his best painting when past 80 years. Goethe continued to write when long past 80. Edison was still inventing at 93. Franklin Lloyd Wright, when  90 was named as being the world’s most creative architect. Shaw was still writing at 90. Grandma Moses didn’t begin painting until 79, (until then she was too busy raising her family and grand kids), and Winston Churchill was over 74 when he became the catalyst that stopped Hitler from victory over all of Europe in WW 11.

Years may wrinkle your skin, but lack of enthusiasm will wrinkle your very Soul.  General Douglas MacArthur, 1950

It’s a tragedy that most of us die long  before we ever really start to Live.  Erich Fromm

Old wine, old leather, old wood and old people all improve with time.  Anonymous

Nothing must be postponed. Eternity can be found in every  moment, and the wise ones seek for it.  David Thoreau, 1855

Who knows if this experience we call dying is not really living, and if living is not really dying? Who knows if to be alive is not really to die, and if dying does not count, in the nether world,  as being alive?  Euripides 454 B. C.

But then,  as tne  song we all know. says——–

“We’ll meet again, don’t know where, don’t know when
But I know we’ll meet again some sunny day.

You’ll smile at me just as you always do
Till the blue skies drive the dark clouds all away.

Please say hello to the folks that we know
Tell them I won’t be long.
They’ll be happy to know,
That as you saw me go,
I was singing  this  song.

We’ll  meet again, don’t know where,  don’t know when,
But I know we’ll meet again some sunny day.”