ON THE DEATH OF A YOUNG WOMAN
The words cry out within me,
and well up as anguish in my throat:
It is not enough!
This life is not complete…
But is it by the numbering of the years
that a life becomes complete?
I think not.
Nothing worth doing is completed in one lifetime.
Nothing we do can be accomplished alone.
Nothing is true or beautiful or good in one time or place only.
But I need your life to complete mine…
Yours, and a thousand others
who feel as I feel
and love as I love
and who do together what none can do alone,
And still it is not complete,
nor would I have it so.
For the truth that comes to me today or tomorrow
Is part of the truth of yesterday.
They belong together, each depends on the other.
No power can rend them apart:
Not even death.
And the beauty I have seen yesterday and today
Is part of the beauty of tomorrow.
It is a whole, it is larger than one life or two,
And other eyes will smile tomorrow
and other hearts leap for joy
to share the ecstasy of beauty discovered:
It gives me comfort to know
That before me, beauty was,
And afterwards, beauty shall be,
And new explorers will discover it as I did,
relishing each moment with pleasure too great
for one person to have to bear alone
in one lifetime.
And that which is good also goes beyond time and place…
My share in it is like a piece of a great interlocking puzzle,
A tiny corner of the whole.
Join hands then with me…
Join heart to heart…
Join anguish with anguish…
And seek good.
Good, when it is found, cannot be hoarded.
It can only be received and passed on.
That is what it is for.
That is why I am here:
to receive and to give…
Not passively like a tunnel that merely channels unchanged whatever comes;
But actively,
Receiving truth and beauty and good from others
as raw materials, as resources,
as the basic ingredients
for the gift I have to give –
Truth shared from my own experience,
Beauty revealed through me,
Good that is not mine to keep
But only mine to give away.
I am not complete without you.
Nothing worth doing is completed in one lifetime.
Nothing we do can be accomplished alone.
Nothing is true or beautiful or good in one time or place only.
But life is larger than I,
And love is larger.
And in that vast sea of life and love,
I am complete.
© Margaret E. Howland
July 22, 1976
(with inspiration from
some words of Reinhold Niebuhr)
