Here's a little poem about dying.
It's called, "The Funeral of Great Aunt Mary."
I had a great aunt who was buried
one day from a little town nearby,
and we all went over there.
And I was struck by something in the funeral.
As Antonio Machado, the great, great Spanish poet says,
"there is no sound on Earth as serious
as the sound of a piece of dirt hitting the casket."
So I was struck by the seriousness of it.
And then the contrast of that was
the minister who was there who is a young man just out
of the seminary.
And he was saying all sorts of things that he didn't believe.
That he didn't really understand.
He wasn't old enough to understand what they did.
And he said that we rejoice the death.
And you know that isn't true.
No one is going to do that.
And when Christ said that, he meant something very different.
He meant that if you spend your life struggling
with your spirit, then you could possibly
rejoice at death because at least you were to live.
But you know, how many people do you know that are really alive?
So those people cannot rejoice at death.
And Christ says there are very few people that
could rejoice at death.
But the minister didn't understand all that,
and he was saying that we all rejoice at death.
Anyway, so this is a poem touching
on what the minister said and the fact--
the sense that we had in his voice that no one believed it.
So we had the strange contrast of something terribly real
combined with something that wasn't really real at all.
And in the end of the poem, there's a mention of the body
not being allowed to be put in the grave.
In Minnesota, in America more and more
we're afraid of feeling anything.
We're afraid of emotion.
So one of the ways they get around it in the Midwest
is that they do not lower the body into the grave
anymore during the ceremony.
They're afraid you might feel something
if you saw that body go right down into the ground.
You might see that clod of dirt hit it.
So what do they do?
They leave it up there with artificial grass around it
on some sort of machine.
And about dusk or so, some undertaker
sneaks out there when no one's looking and lowers it
into the ground.
Anyway, so this is a poem called,
"At the Funeral of Great Aunt Mary."
"Here we are, all dressed up to honor death.
No, it is not that.
It is to honor this old woman born in Bellingham.
The church windows are open to the green trees.
The minister tells us that being the sons and daughters of God,
we rejoice at death, for we go to the mansions prepared
from the foundations of the world.
Impossible.
No one believes it.
Out under bare pioneer field, the frail body
must wait till dusk to be lowered
in the hot and sandy Earth."