Turn-of-the-Twentieth Century poet Henry Van Dyke is perhaps best known as the author who penned the lyrics “Joyful Joyful We Adore Thee” (1907) to the melody of Beethoven’s “Ode to Joy.” He also wrote a beautiful nautical allegory about dying entitled “Gone from my Sight.” Nationally recognized hospice nurse Barbara Karnes, RN, uses the latter in some of her imminently accessible end-of-life instructional material. The poem reads:
I am standing upon the seashore. A ship at my
side spreads her white sails to the morning breeze and
starts for the blue ocean. She is an object of beauty
and strength. I stand and watch her until at length she
hangs like a speck of white cloud just where the sea
and sky come to mingle with each other.
The someone at my side says: “There, she is
gone!”
“Gone where?”
Gone from my sight. That is all. She is just as large
in mast and hull and spar as she was when she left my
side and she is just as able to bear the load of living
freight to her destined port.
Her diminished size is in me, not her. And just
at the moment when someone at my side says: “There,
she is gone!” There are other eyes watching her
coming, and other voices ready to take up the glad
shout: “Here she comes!”
And that is dying.
Remember that dying is an experience. It is not an event with a finite point, but rather a node on the greater continuum of life.
