“Death is nothing at all.”

Last updated on: May 20, 2015 at 10:24 pm by Dan Peterson

“Death is nothing at all.” 2015-05-20T22:24:38-06:00 Dan Peterson

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Aerial view of St. Paul’s Cathedral, in London, by Mark Frosh
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“Death is nothing at all. It does not count. I have only slipped away into the next room. Nothing has happened. Everything remains exactly as it was. I am I, and you are you, and the old life that we lived so fondly together is untouched, unchanged. Whatever we were to each other, that we are still. Call me by the old familiar name. Speak of me in the easy way which you always used. Put no difference into your tone. Wear no forced air of solemnity or sorrow. Laugh as we always laughed at the little jokes that we enjoyed together. Play, smile, think of me, pray for me. Let my name be ever the household word that it always was. Let it be spoken without an effort, without the ghost of a shadow upon it. Life means all that it ever meant. It is the same as it ever was. There is absolute and unbroken continuity. What is this death but a negligible accident? Why should I be out of mind because I am out of sight? I am but waiting for you, for an interval, somewhere very near, just round the corner. All is well. Nothing is hurt; nothing is lost. One brief moment and all will be as it was before. How we shall laugh at the trouble of parting when we meet again!”

Henry Scott Holland (d. 1918)

As I drove to the airport tonight, I was in a rather melancholy mood. Several of our longtime neighbors are suddenly moving away (one of them to serve as a mission president in Europe) . A close colleague is leaving the University for a long-term Church assignment abroad. And someone whom I respect enormously and whom my wife and I have come to know somewhat over the past few years has, very likely, at most only a few weeks to live.

Samuel Barber’s hauntingly, achingly, beautiful Adagio for Strings came on the radio. It caught my mood perfectly.

But the quotation above from Henry Scott Holland, excerpted from a sermon that he delivered as canon of St. Paul’s Cathedral in May 1910 upon the death of King Edward VII, is helpful. (Holland then went on to serve from 1910 until his own death in 1918 as Regius Professor of Divinity at Oxford.)

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