Yesterday morning’s date, March 4, kept niggling in my brain. But until an email arrived from my youngest cousin Dan, the significance of the date escaped me. It was the anniversary of my father’s death. The fifteenth anniversary, to be exact.

Fifteen years since Dad’s soul left the body that imprisoned him for so many years.
Fifteen years since his wide grin graced my day.
Fifteen years since his family said good-by to the bravest man we knew.
Fifteen years later, my cousin Dan remembered the loss by sending this passage. I hope resonates in you as deeply as it did in him and in me.

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 each other.

Then someone at my side says: ‘There, she is gone!’
‘Gone where?’
Gone from my sight. That’s all. She is just as large in mast and hull and spar as she was when she left my side and she is just as able to bear the load of living freight to her destined port.

Her diminished size is in me, not in her. And just at the 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

In memory of Harlan John Stratton: May 11, 1929 – March 4, 1997
Here he comes!