Life Is For The Living

I Do Not Die

By: Mary Elizabeth Frye 1932 

Do not stand at my grave and weep,

I am not there, I do not sleep.

I am in a thousand winds that blow,

I am the softly falling snow.

I am the gentle showers of rain,

I am the fields of ripening grain.

I am in the morning hush,

I am in the graceful rush

Of beautiful birds in circling flight,

I am the starshine of the night.

I am in the flowers that bloom,

I am in a quiet room.

I am in the birds that sing,

I am in each lovely thing.

Do not stand at my grave and cry,

I am not there. I do not die.

I found the above poem in 1976 after my friend Susan died. We were both 17 at the time.  These words have brought comfort to myself and  tofriends many times over the years.  This poem found it's way to me time and again when I have lost someone I love.  When Susan died, when my boyfriend died a few years later, when my mother in law died, and when my father passed the poem appears in print or the clipping falls out of a book just at the right time.   A gentle reminder that the grave is for the living because the spirit does not die.


I am not a person who has patience for drama queens. Tragedy is a part of life and we all experience pain.  I try to find  a positive in any negative.  People are born, people die, and somewhere in the middle people live but there is a difference between being alive and truly  living.  A friend of mine lost her son in Afghanistan recently and another lost her husband to cancer. Each one of these women describe the grieving as a series of feelings that begins with hopelessness and loss, then anger, then guilt, and then they begin to live again.  Each one of them have walked through the fire and then continued to take steps to  live a way that honors the person they lost.  I admire them both.

My favorite auther is Barbara Johnson. She is an author who lost one son in Vietnam and  then the other son was hit by a drunk driver and was killed.  The third son adopted a lifestyle that left him estranged for many years. Barbara grieved, become depressed, guilt ridden, and angry until she decided that she couldn't change fate, she could only respond to it.  She began to surround herself with positive thoughts, wrote books, started a support group, and conducted motivational seminars.   Her sons must be so proud as they sit in heaven and watching how their mother took a negative and turned it into something beautiful.  Barbara was diagnosed with cancer in 2001 and died in July 2007.  She lived right up until the end with  her final book on the editors desk.  What an incredible woman.

Losing someone I love makes me feel as though I am dying too.  I am not a person who allows society to define me and one of the artists I really like is Pink because she is true to her own voice.    Her album "I'm Not Dead" was titled as such because she is feisty and refuses to sit down and be quiet.   Her lyrics can be abrupt , they can be raw, but they are always honest. One of my favorites:

I'm not dead just floating

Right between the ink of your tattoo

I've tried to hide my scars from you.

I'm not scared just changing.

There isn't anyone who can lose someone through death or estrangement, and then emerge unchanged.  Loss changes us.  We will never be the same,  but it is up to us if the change gives our life purpose or if we let the pain hold us back.  I don't want to live in pain and I don't want to forget.  Around my neck I wear a thin gold chain.  The chain is connected to a memory.  Although the chain is not always foremost in my thoughts, I am always aware it is there.  This is where I keep the people who I have lost. They are such a part of me, that I don't need to consciously keep them in my thoughts.  They are so much a part of me that I don't need the pain to remind me of them.  Sometimes their memory will speak to me when I least expect it and,  for a moment, once again they are close to me.  Yes, life is for the living  but death taught me not to take others for granted.  Death also taught me that I should not merely want to live,  I need to live my life with purpose.  Life isn't about the event, it is  about how we respond to it.