In 1963, in Birmingham, Alabama Dr. Martin Luther King Jr., delivered the eulogy for four children who were killed in a bombing in a Black church. Five years later, he was himself assassinated. His eulogy for those martyred children eloquently described his feelings about death.
“Death is not a period that ends the great sentence of life, but a comma that punctuates it to more lofty significance. Death is not a blind alley that leads the human race into a state of nothingness, but an open door which leads man into eternal life.” Martin Luther King Jr.
Have No Regrets
“May we live respected and die regretted.” Unknown
“Our dead are never dead to us, until we have forgotten them.” George Eliot
“God pours life into death and death into life without a drop being spilled.” Author Unknown
“Death is not the greatest loss in life. The greatest loss is what dies inside us while we live.” Norman Cousins
“Some people are so afraid to die that they never begin to live.” Henry Van Dyke
“It is foolish and wrong to mourn the men who died. Rather we should thank God that such men lived.” George S. Patton, Jr.
“Life is a great sunrise. I do not see why death should not be an even greater one.” Vladimir Nobokov
“….although death has come out of the closet, it is still not openly experienced or discussed. Allowing dying to be so intensely present enriches both the preciousness of each moment and our detachment from it.” Ram Dass
Finish the Mission of Life
“Here is the test to find whether your mission on earth is finished: If you’re alive, it isn’t.” Richard Bach
“Death– the last sleep? No the final awakening.” Walter Scott
“As a well spent day brings happy sleep, so life well used brings happy death.” Leonardo DaVinci
“Life and death are one thread, the same line viewed from different sides.” Lao Tzu
“Life is pleasant. Death is peaceful. It’s the transition that’s troublesome.” Isaac Asimov
“How strange this fear of death is! We are never frightened at a sunset. ” George MacDonald
No Fear the Adventure Continues
“No one wants to die. Even people who want to go to heaven don’t want to die to get there. And yet death is the destination we all share. No one has ever escaped it. And that is as it should be, because Death is very likely the single best invention of Life. It is Life’s change agent. It clears out the old to make way for the new.” Steve Jobs
“Death is not the opposite of life, but a part of it.” Haruki Murakami
J.K. Rowling said….”To the well-organized mind, death is but the next great adventure.” We will all someday experience that adventure. Take comfort in the fact that we are not supposed to always live in the physical world. And that our souls survive. This was so beautifully stated as, “For life and death are one, even as the river and the sea are one” by Kahlil Gibran.
