Married To Amazement

 Another poem by Mary Oliver, because she gets it.

When Death Comes

When death comes like the hungry bear in autumn; when death comes and takes all the bright coins from his purse to buy me, and snaps the purse shut; when death comes like the measle-pox; when death comes like an iceberg between the shoulder blades, I want to step through the door full of curiosity, wondering: what is it going to be like, that cottage of darkness? And therefore I look upon everything as a brotherhood and a sisterhood, and I look upon time as no more than an idea, and I consider eternity as another possibility, and I think of each life as a flower, as common as a field daisy, and as singular, and each name a comfortable music in the mouth, tending, as all music does, toward silence,

and each body a lion of courage, and something precious to the earth. When it’s over, I want to say: all my life I was a bride married to amazement. I was the bridegroom, taking the world into my arms. When it’s over, I don’t want to wonder if I have made of my life something particular, and real. I don’t want to find myself sighing and frightened, or full of argument. I don’t want to end up simply having visited this world.

Seven years ago a friend of my daughter (and a FB friend of mine), a talented and prolific writer, shared the following post about death which I saved because it resonates with me.

"She rose, weightless and filled with light, her mind a beacon calling to wonders beyond that which she had known, her heart a pulse matching the rhythm of universe and others who were traveling. Vast constellations of light (like stars) shifted and changed as she moved along her own continuum. She was not who she had been and yet had never been more herself; there was no fear - only a kind of awe that it should be like this. 

In the distance, something said her name; it was a feeling more than a noise, and her excitement carried her quickly along to what felt certain to be her Next Place. Another adventure. A new beginning. She looked behind only once, to send them her love, and whispered that, in the end, time is something you wake from when you are tired of sleeping." 💖