Three weeks on.

Three weeks on.

Today the sun shines, the birds are singing their little heads off and the first camellias are out - as are my camera batteries.  Drat!

 The two poems below I find of immense comfort and could you have two more disparate people:  a Baltimore housewife and a famous British Canon?

My thanks to Wikipedia for research details

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 Elizabeth Frye

Mary Elizabeth Frye (November 13, 1905 - September 15, 2004) was a Baltimore housewife and florist, best known as the author of the poem Do not stand at my grave and weep, written in 1932.^[1]

She was orphaned at the age of three and moved to Baltimore when she was twelve. She was an avid reader with a remarkable memory. In 1927 she married Claud Frye, who ran a clothing business, while she grew and sold flowers. The poem for which she became famous was originally composed on a brown paper shopping bag. Because people liked her twelve-line, untitled verse, she made many copies and circulated them privately. She never published or copyrighted the poem.^[1]

The identity of the author of the poem was unknown until the late 1990s, when Frye revealed that she had written it. Her claim was confirmed in 1998 after research by Abigail Van Buren.^[1]

 

Death is nothing at all.

 

I have only slipped away into the next room

I am I and you are you: whatever we were to each other, that we still are.

Call me by my old familiar name,

Speak to me in the easy way you always used.  Put no difference into your tone; wear no forced air of solemnity or sorrow.

Laugh as we always laughed at the little jokes we enjoyed together.  Play,

smile, think of me, pray for me.  Let my name be forever the same as it always was.  Let it be spoken without an effort, without the ghost of a shadow on it.

Life means all that it ever meant.

It is the same as it always was; there is absolutely unbroken continuity.

I am but waiting for you, for an interval, somewhere very near, just around the corner.

All is well.

Canon Scott Holland

He was born at Ledbury, Herefordshire, the son of George Henry Holland (1818–1891) of Dumbleton Hall, Evesham, and of the Hon. Charlotte Dorothy Gifford, the daughter of Lord Gifford. He was educated at Eton where he was a pupil of the influential Master William Johnson Cory, and at the Balliol College of the University of Oxford where he took a first class degree in Greats. During his Oxford time he was greatly influenced by T.H. Green. He had the Oxford degrees of DD, MA, and Honorary DLitt.

After graduation, he was elected as a Student (fellow) of Christ Church, Oxford. In 1884, he left Oxford for St Paul's Cathedral where he was appointed canon.

In 1910, he was appointed Regius Professor of Divinity at Oxford University, a post he held until his death in 1918. He is buried in the churchyard of All Saints church, Cuddesdon near Oxford. Because of his surname, Mary Gladstone referred to him affectionately as "Flying Dutchman" and "Fliegende Hollander"^{[citation needed]}.

While at St Paul’s Cathedral Holland delivered a sermon in May 1910 following the death of King Edward VII, titled Death the King of Terrors, in which he explores the natural but seemingly contradictory responses to death: the fear of the unexplained and the belief in continuity. It is from his discussion of the latter that perhaps his best-known writing, Death is nothing at all, is drawn:

Wikisource has original text related to this article: The King of Terrors