Saturday, October 13, 2012



On the Death of a High School Friend who shared my youth.......


One of my High School friends, Kathy O'Brien Fox, fondly remembered as OB, died this week finally succombing to Alzheimers disease. One of her greatest joys was sailing and so her daughter, Lisa Ann, read this poem to us:



What Is Dying?
Bishop Charles Henry Brent

Written on the death of his wife
____________________________________

I am standing on the sea shore.

A ship sails to the morning breeze and starts for the ocean.

She is an object of beauty and I stand watching her until at last she fades on the horizon, 
(I think she added here how horizon and sky came together until only a small spec remained and then disappeared ...)

and someone at my side says, 'She is gone' Gone where? Gone from my sight, that is all.

She is just as large in the masts, hull and spars as she was when I saw her, and just as able to bear her load of living freight to its destination.

The diminished size and total loss of sight is in me, not in her.

And just at the moment when someone at my side says, 'she is gone' 

there are others who are watching her coming, 
and other voices take up the glad shout, 
'there she comes.'


That is what dying is.
An horizon and just the limit of our sight.
Lift us up O Lord, that we may see further
.

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I could see Kathy's twinkling eyes in the eyes of her children and hear her laughter in the Heavens as she shared her last Hurrah at the Irish wake afterwards - ... I'm sure you all heard her laughter too as she flew across the sea toward the horizon, "at first a tiny spec, until you could see her no more"... None of us knows when, the hour or the day. But we can rest assured, 

She waits for us there.

I truly look more forward than backward these days, to when we can all be seventeen again and close - like then - forever and a day.

Three of us old classmates drove down to the beach to watch the pounding surf at Grand Haven whipped by the gale "winds of November come early." It rained all day and the roaring of the sea still crashes across my mind. 

I thought, "this is what she saw; this is where she lived, this is what she loved. She had a grand life and lived it widely. MayGod grant her eternal peace and may her soul find rest in Thee O Lord.

'till we meet again.........