William Stafford, For My Young Friends Who Are Afraid, from Ask Me. Copyright © 2014 by the Estate of William Stafford. Reprinted with the permission of Graywolf Press, Minneapolis, Minnesota, www.graywolfpress.org

Grief at premature death

Also suitable for: coping with the loss of a child

A premature death feels entirely different to the loss of a person who has had their time and used it well. The terrible, gasping unfairness of it all compounds our grief, and the shock of losing someone we thought we had decades longer to enjoy is ghastly. When the person we have lost is a child, the sense of horror, of a fundamental unnaturalness, is even more staggering. There is very little to be said that can make it any more bearable.

And yet Ben Jonson has found something to say, and it is a comfort. He tells us that the value of our lives is not dictated by their length, or their solidity. Living like an oak tree, becoming ancient and huge and eventually toppling over under our own weight, is not the only way to live a good human life. For all that the oak is strong, it will never flower.

There are those among us who are lilies. They may be destined only to last for a summer’s day, but they are, as Jonson says, the plant and flower of light. Their beauty is not constrained by their fragility, and nor is their impact diminished by its brevity. Their life, though it may be short, can still be perfect. In fact, it may be in part because they are with us for such a brief time that they manage to move us as they do.

The essential thing when thinking about a life cut short is not to imagine it as an oak sapling, cut before its prime. Those we lost were never meant to be grand old trees at all. Instead, they lived their days bright and treasured; they bloomed before they fell, and that was enough. Their lives were beautiful, and whole, and perfect, like a flower on a summer’s day. They are gone now, but their memory remains with us, a source of light. It will never be extinguished.

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