"Here she comes!"

Over the past few years I have lost too many loved ones; many to cancer but heart disease, stroke and aging have made their claims too.  At times it feels like I am either saying goodbye or steeling myself for the inevitable and total separation that is to surely come.  

Here is a poem that I discovered in "The Family Handbook of Hospice Care."  I read it often.  It calms me.  It contains, for me, just the right amount of sweetness and mystery.  

     THE END OF THE JOURNEY

I am standing upon the seashore.  A ship at my side spreads her white sails to the morning breeze and starts for the blue ocean. 

 She is an object of beauty and strength.

I stand and watch her until at length she hangs like a speck of white cloud just where the sea and sky come to mingle with each other.  

Then someone at my  side says: "There, she is gone!"

'Gone where?"

Gone from my sight.  That is all.

Her diminished size is in me, not in her.  And just at that moment when someone at my side says: "There she is gone!" there are other eyes watching her coming, and other voices ready to take up the glad shout: "Here she comes!"

And that is dying.

        ---Henry Van Dyke