In the early years of my ordained ministry one of the most popular poems requested at a funeral was; ‘Death is nothing at all’ by Professor Henry Scott Holland, Canon of St.Paul’s Cathedral London. It reads:
Death is nothing at all.
It does not count.
I have only slipped away into the next room.
Nothing has happened.
Everything remains exactly as it was.
I am I, and you are you,
and the old life that we lived so fondly together is untouched, unchanged.
Whatever we were to each other, that we are still.
Call me by the old familiar name.
Speak of me in the easy way which 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 that we enjoyed together.
Play, smile, think of me, pray for me.
Let my name be ever the household word that it always was.
Let it be spoken without an effort, without the ghost of a shadow upon it.
Life means all that it ever meant.
It is the same as it ever was.
There is absolute and unbroken continuity.
What is this death but a negligible accident?
Why should I be out of mind because I am out of sight?
I am but waiting for you, for an interval,
somewhere very near,
just round the corner.
All is well.
It was a poem that always annoyed me. I could see how it could bring comfort but its opening lines; ‘Death is nothing at all, it does not count’ always seemed to denigrate the impact that the death of a loved one could have upon the bereaved. I knew from my own experience of death, that it wasn’t ‘nothing at all’ and that it did count because it was something so overwhelming and physical that it left one reeling.
As the poem progress it is a hopeful reminding us that our loved ones departed are not very far away from us and that we will one day (we hope) be reunited with them. Remembering those we have lost, speaking their name and about them are good things to do and Scott Holland’s phrase:
“Why should I be out of mind because I am out of sight?”
I believe is a very good question for us all to ponder. We should not forget our departed loved ones we should remember them, talk about them, laugh about them and get cross with them for leaving us. They should not be out of mind but their death is NOT nothing it is something immense.
This poem was never meant to be used as a poem. It was actually part of a sermon preached in St.Paul’s London by Scott Holland on the Sunday following Edward VII’s death and his lying in State prior to his funeral in 1910.
In the sermon Scott Holland began by saying, ‘I suppose all of us hover between two ways of regarding death’. The famous ‘death is nothing at all’ was the second. The first approach was the exact opposite, to ‘recoil from it as embodying the supreme and irrevocable disaster’. In his sermon Scott Holland was trying to resolve the tension between these two views of death - the ultimate disaster or nothing at all and he does so brilliantly when he says:
“Our task is to deny neither judgement, but to combine both… Only through their reconciliation can the fitness of our human experience be preserved in its entirety.”
and he is right. I wish I had discovered his sermon in my early years of ministry as it was only with the advent if the internet that I got the full context of the ‘poem’ that was never meant to be used as a poem. It was meant to be an illustration of one extreme approach to death, whereby we try to hide from death’s reality. Death is always going to be more than something trivial, even if we try to make it such. The reality of death is that it changes us and we never forget our loved ones and neither do we stop mourning them; we just get better at living with the emotions, pains and joys that bereavement brings upon us.
Scott Holland’s poem is usually ended with the phrase; ‘All is well.’ As you might expect with this piece of writing it is not actually the end of the poem and quite often the last couple of sentences are missed out. The poem actually ends:
“… All is well.
Nothing is hurt; nothing is lost.
One brief moment and all will be as it was before.
How we shall laugh at the trouble of parting when we meet again!”
I can see why it gets amended. Nothing is lost from a relationship when someone dies for those of us who remain remember and we remember both the good and the bad. The sentiment of meeting again or losing nothing is good but I think that our Eucharistic prayer says it better:
“Help us, who are baptised into the fellowship of Christ’s Body to live and work to your praise and glory; may we grow together in unity and love until at last, in your new creation, we enter into our heritage in the company of the Virgin Mary, the apostles and prophets, and of all our brothers and sisters living and departed.”
When we gather at the altar and celebrate the Eucharist together we do so with all the living and departed as the prayer tells us. It is, I believe, a time when the distance between us and our loved ones departed is incredibly thin. It is one of those liminal places between Heaven and Earth and knowing this always brings me comfort when I am missing my loved ones. The first thing I knew I had to do after my sister died was to celebrate the Eucharist the following day, a Sunday; as I knew it would be an opportunity for me to give thanks for her life and to come close to her once again.
Death is not nothing at all but neither should it be something that totally overwhelms us and as our funeral liturgy says; ‘isolates us from others’. Death is something we all have to face and to accept and learn to live with. In learning to live with death we do not allow it to control our lives or to destroy them. Rather, we continue to journey through life in the hope that we are reunited with those we love when we die.