Valley of Life | Online Memorial Blog

Having a close loved one die, like a husband or wife, is a personal and deep event that only the one left behind can truly know or understand. The help and support you receive during this time of grief is played against what you would do and say if your beloved was sitting there with you, listening and holding your hand. Condolence by Dorothy Parker is a condolence poem that tries to capture that feeling of sadness and that knowledge that only the one lost would truly understand how you feel in that moment.

Condolence

They hurried here, as soon as you had died,
Their faces damp with haste and sympathy,
And pressed my hand in theirs, and smoothed my knee,
And clicked their tongues, and watched me, mournful-eyed.
Gently they told me of that Other Side-
How, even then, you waited there for me,
And what ecstatic meeting ours would be.
Moved by the lovely tale, they broke, and cried.

And when I smiled, they told me I was brave,
And they rejoiced that I was comforted,
And left to tell of all the help they gave.
But I had smiled to think how you, the dead,
So curiously preoccupied and grave,
Would laugh, could you have heard the things they said.

~Dorothy Parker

This entry was posted on Wednesday, December 12th, 2007 at 9:51 am and is filed under Poetry. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.