The Next Room

      I just finished reading a very moving post from a daughter on her father’s passing and I felt very much like sharing a beautiful, and strangely uplifting, poem on Death, the final frontier.

      Our family was grieving the passing of a young, and much loved, nephew by suicide. The whole family was deeply traumatized by guilt for not having been able to prevent him from taking the extreme step especially since he had been a very gentle, caring and lovely soul. All of us were adrift and were trying desperately to make some sense of the whole thing. At that point my cousin’s husband had shared this amazingly soulful poem with us. 

      I reproduce the poem written by Henry Scott Holland here.

      Death is nothing at all.

      I have only slipped away to the next room.

      I am I and you are you.

      Whatever we were to each other

      That, we are still.

      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 always 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 around the corner.

      All is well.

      In the words of Rumi, the greatest Sufi mystic and poet in the Persian language – “The wound is the place where the Light enters you.”

      My pranams at the lotus feet of Gurudev 🙏.