The Beauty of What Remains: How Our Greatest Fear Becomes Our Greatest Gift

That’s really all they ask of us—our parents; our lovers, husbands, and wives; our children and dear friends. That we carry them gently in our lives as they carried us in theirs. Not with crushing sadness, for they do not wish such weight upon us. But with lightness and warmth. God bless them for the memories they left for us that make carrying them with joy possible. The wisdom and love they bequeathed us. The joy and comfort they brought to us as they carried us through life so that now we might carry them forever in our hearts—without bitterness, without crushing sadness. When someone has loved us well and long, we need not buckle beneath the weight of sorrow. Instead, we can carry them with us with gratitude, completeness, and joy.

Your children will be sad," I tell Franny, "but they will not die because you die. They will live and laugh and love with everything you have given them in their hearts forever. They will discover you in unexpected moments and places for the rest of their lives.

It is the impermanence of the body that has convinced me of the eternality of the soul. Physics tells us that energy never dies, it merely assumes a different form. I never feel this more deeply than when gazing upon a dead body, a vessel emptied of its life force, a force that must surely now exist elsewhere.

Understanding death - its rituals, its lessons, its gift to reshape love through memory, its grief, its powerful reminder that it is not what but who we have that matters - gives our lives exquisite meaning.

, and not because they are exceptional, but because they are human, like all of us, with a capacity to move forward in life despite the worst pain of death and grief.

This is the beauty and the tragedy of my father's life and death. For him, for me, for most of us at the time, for better and for worse, death is life's mirror.

When you show people a picture of a circle with a small wedge cut out of it, their eyes first go to the missing piece every time. It is easy among the doctors, the needles, and the tubes to lose sight of the beauty that was. Despite our pain, our fear, and our very real loses, we would do well to think about our many past blessing with our loved one who is now diminished. There is so much more to who we were and who we are than just the missing piece.

We are helpless in death, but we are not helpless in life.

The beauty of flowers depends on the fact that they soon wither. How deeply could one deathless "human" being really love another? It is the simple fact that we do not have forever that makes our love for each other so profound.

Life is not a journey to the grave with the intention of arriving safely in a pretty and well-preserved body. The goal is to skid in broadside; tires smoking, body all dented, leaking fluids, and your fuel gauge on empty; thoroughly used up and worn out, and loudly proclaiming, ‘Holy shit, what a ride!

Birth is a beginning and death a destination; But life is a journey. A going, a growing from stage to stage: From childhood to maturity and youth to old age; From innocence to awareness and ignorance to knowing; From foolishness to discretion and then perhaps, to wisdom. From weakness to strength or strength to weakness and often back again. From health to sickness and back, we pray, to health again; From offense to forgiveness, from loneliness to love From joy to gratitude, from pain to compassion From grief to understanding, from fear to faith; From defeat to defeat to defeat, until, looking backward or ahead: We see that victory lies not at some high place along the way, But in having made the journey, stage by stage, a sacred pilgrimage. . . .

have seen more than a thousand dead bodies, and it is clear that the body is not the person—that there is so much more to us than our corporeal being. It is the impermanence of the body that has convinced me of the eternality of the soul. Physics tells us that energy never dies, it merely assumes a different form. I never feel this more deeply than when gazing upon a dead body, a vessel emptied of its life force, a force that must surely now exist elsewhere.

Memory is light, illuminating and reminding me of so many things about my dad; reminding each of us who mourn a love both gone and yet still present, still warm and aglow even when skies are gray. If we remember, nothing can ever take our sunshine away. 8 Nobody Wants Your Crap To have more does not mean to be more. —Abraham Joshua Heschel

If life is good then death must be bad is the way most people think, but this isn't really so. I am not for a moment trying to make sense of the death of a child or anyone who has not been granted his or her full measure of life. But generally speaking, is more really better or is there something about death that defines the essence of life itself?