HELP! Quote needed for a funeral....

[astrid]

My dear friend's father passed away last week, and she's looking for a quotation or passage to read at his burial. The don't want anything religious, but a poem or passage that's more about a life that has made a difference, a life with meaning or a life well-lived.

 

Can you think of anything??

 

Thanks so much,

astrid

[lionfamily1999]

Life is pleasant. Death is peaceful. It's the transition that's troublesome. Isaac Asimov

http://www.quotationspage.com/subjects/death/

 

hth

[MariannNOVA]

At my dad's funeral, we had an actor do a dramatic reading of 'I will not go gently into that great night.'

[Crimson Wife]

At my grandma's funeral, my dad read Emily Dickinson's Because I Could Not Stop for Death.

[Spy Car]

Inscription for a Gravestone

 

BY ROBINSON JEFFERS

 

I am not dead, I have only become inhuman:

That is to say,

Undressed myself of laughable prides and infirmities,

But not as a man

Undresses to creep into bed, but like an athlete

Stripping for the race.

The delicate ravel of nerves that made me a measurer

Of certain fictions

Called good and evil; that made me contract with pain

And expand with pleasure;

Fussily adjusted like a little electroscope:

That’s gone, it is true;

(I never miss it; if the universe does,

How easily replaced!)

But all the rest is heightened, widened, set free.

I admired the beauty

While I was human, now I am part of the beauty.

I wander in the air,

Being mostly gas and water, and flow in the ocean;

Touch you and Asia

At the same moment; have a hand in the sunrises

And the glow of this grass.

I left the light precipitate of ashes to earth

For a love-token.

[Mrs Mungo]

My dear friend's father passed away last week, and she's looking for a quotation or passage to read at his burial. The don't want anything religious, but a poem or passage that's more about a life that has made a difference, a life with meaning or a life well-lived.

 

Can you think of anything??

 

Thanks so much,

astrid

 

I wrote the elegy I read at my grandfather's funeral, the theme was based around the General Patton quote, "pressure makes diamonds." Maybe she could find a quote that inspires her? What do you know about her father?

[theYoungerMrsWarde]

Do not stand at my grave and weep by Mary Elizabeth Frye

 

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 rushOf 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 bereftI am not there. I have not left.

[Mejane]

Love this:

 

What Is Success?

To laugh often and much;

to win the respect of intelligent people

and the affection of children;

to earn the appreciation of honest critics

and endure the betrayal of false friends;

to appreciate beauty;

to find the best in others;

to leave the world a bit better

whether by a healthy child,

a garden patch, or a redeemed social condition;

to know that one life has breathed easier

because you lived here.

This is to have succeeded.

 

-Ralph Waldo Emerson

[astrid]

Thanks so much, everyone! I've passed them along....

 

astrid

[kalanamak]

If he was a outward-bound do-er, the poem To Be of Use, or perhaps the closing of Song of Myself:

 

The last scud of day holds back for me,

It flings my likeness after the rest and true as any on the shadow'd wilds,

It coaxes me to the vapor and the dusk.

 

I depart as air, I shake my white locks at the runaway sun,

I effuse my flesh in eddies, and drift it in lacy jags.

 

I bequeath myself to the dirt to grow from the grass I love,

If you want me again look for me under your boot-soles.

 

You will hardly know who I am or what I mean,

But I shall be good health to you nevertheless,

And filter and fibre your blood.

 

Failing to fetch me at first keep encouraged,

Missing me one place search another,

I stop somewhere waiting for you.

[kalanamak]

At my dad's funeral, we had an actor do a dramatic reading of 'I will not go gently into that great night.'

 

This poem is nicely alterable, and I love to recite it twisted around, when I think of my very, very ancient Papa going when he wanted to go:

 

Oh do go gentle into that good night,

Sing, sigh, with the dying of the light.

 

The rest of the poem can be altered similarly.