The Irrelevance of Death

I just returned from a memorial service for the baby of my friends, Norman and Kristy. Their daughter, Eliyana Grace Dannug, was still born 8 months after conception. It was a beautiful service and I was especially touched by the following poem which graced the inside of the memorial card:

Now, when the frail and fine-spun
web of mortality
gapes, and lets slip
what we have loved so long
out of our lighted present
into the trackless dark

we turn, blinded,
not to the Christ in Glory,
stars about his feet

but to the Son of Man,
back from the tomb,
who built fire, ate fish,
spoke with friends, and walked
a dusty road at evening.

Here, in this room, in
this stark and timeless moment
we hear those footsteps

and
with suddenly lifted hearts
acknowledge
the irrelevance of death.

- Evangeline Paterson