A voice hissed: He sheds tears! It was taken around the ring Usal gives moisture to the dead! He felt fingers touch his damp cheek, heard the awed whispers.

You know when you cut yourself really badly, it doesn't hurt for a while. You don't feel anything. Death- our reaction to death- is sort of like that. You don't feel anything at all. And then, later on, you begin to hurt.

No matter how prepared you think you are for the death of a loved one, it still comes as a shock, and it still hurts very deeply.

They knew that their story wasn't over when their life was over—that their bodies, somehow, someway, were destined to be a part of that story, and so it mattered where and how those bodies were buried. When the day came to go to the "city" God had "prepared for them," they wanted to walk into that city together, as a family.

One short sleep past, we wake eternally, and death shall be no more, death thou shalt die.

Yet though these ways be lost, thou hast left one, Which is, immoderate grief that she is gone. But we may 'scape that sin, yet weep as much; Our tears are due because we are not such. Some tears, that knot of friends, her death must cost, Because the chain is broke, but no link lost.

Mythology is the womb of mankind's initiation to life and death.

Death is a door. When we close our eyes in this life, we will open our eyes to Jesus.

Jesus always interpreted hardship in light of the end of the story, and at the end of the story we will be without shame.

Heaven: the Coney Island of the Christian imagination.

There is a fragrance in the air, a certain passage of a song, an old photograph falling out from the pages of a book, the sound of somebody's voice in the hall that makes your heart leap and fills your eyes with tears. Who can say when or how it will be that something easters up out of the dimness to remind us of a time before we were born and after we will die?

Like Adam, we have all lost Paradise; and yet we carry Paradise around inside of us in the form of a longing for, almost a memory of, a blessedness that is no more, or the dream of a blessedness that may someday be again.