Do not stand on my grave and weep

Do not stand at my grave and weep,
I am not there, I do not sleep.

I am a thousand winds that blow.
I am the diamond glint on snow.
I am the sunlight on ripened grain.
I am the gentle autumn rain.

When you wake in the morning hush,
I am the swift, uplifting rush
Of quiet birds in circling flight.
I am the soft starlight at night.

Do not stand at my grave and weep.
I am not there, I do not sleep.
Do not stand at my grave and cry.
I am not there, I did not die!
Mary Frye (1932)

When my grandmother died I read this peom out at her funeral, and now as I visit it years later it puts some thoughts of mine into perspective.

Everyone dies. You go about your life happily, looking forward to next weekend, wanting life to be big and beautiful. You live pushing yourself to be happy and strive to live life to the full, reaching your aspirations.

But really, you never really think that as each second passes you are closer to your final demise. Your born, you live and then you die, that is it. The human race looks far too deeply into what is impossible to figure out, or what simply isn’t there. But really, you never die.

Well if you were looking at it logically them, sure, your dead and you aren’t ever coming back, but what I consider life is what you leave behind. You were there but then you weren’t, but the fact that you were there in the first place, and that you will always have the fact that you were there and that did happen, brings the subject of death lighter on the heart.

This is reassuring, because it means that no matter what, when you die you will still have that little thing that was yours and nobody can ever take that away from you. Life is a very funny thing, and no matter what you do, it won’t ever stop, even when you die you keep going.

I like to think that everything is there and quietly waiting for that next chapter to be added, and it is always being made and thought about. There will be people living on after you, people you cared about and people who cared about you. You put your mark on the planet and nothing could ever take that away from you. You will never die for there will be memories of you that will, and still, hang in the air endlessly. And although memories are not enough for the ones who are left behind, you have the comfort of knowing it happened once and that can never be changed. Everybody has lived once, for a long or a short time, but then they died, as it was there time to pass on life to the next generation.

When that generation leaves, although the memory of you dies with them, it doesn’t change the fact that you still lived. You once walked this earth, breathed the air and lived a life. Everybody dies, but no one truly leaves this world.

Well, thats just what I think.

"Stories never really end...even if the books like to pretend they do. Stories always go on. They don't end on the last page, any more than they begin on the first page."

There's the rest of the world that you come into, and the rest of the world that you leave, and the rest of the world will keep on living, and there memories and thoughts will keep on living to.