An Elegy

In Memoriam: Cesar Diaz, Jr. (1972-2007) Classmate and friend.

I never left high school.  When news of Mangoy's sudden passing reached me, shock and sadness hit me like one who've lost a friend he'd just had a chat with a day earlier in an all too familiar school grounds of FCIC.  Years suddenly turned into just a few hours back.  A friend and classmate whose memory - even years and distance, and now - death - could not obscure. 

I came across an excerpt of a poem from a favorite poet, Rilke.  A fitting elegy.

Of course, it is strange to inhabit the earth no longer,
to no longer use skills on had barely time to acquire;
not to observe roses and other things that promised
so much in terms of a human future, no longer
to be what one was in infinitely anxious hands;
to even discard one's own name as easily as a child
abandons a broken toy.
Strange, not to desire to continue wishing one's wishes.
Strange to notice all that was related, fluttering
so loosely in space. And being dead is hard work
and full of retrieving before one can gradually feel a
trace of eternity. -Yes, but the liviing make
the mistake of drawing too sharp a distinction.
Angels (they say) are often unable to distinguish
between moving among the living or the dead.
The eternal torrent whirls all ages along with it,
through both realms forever, and their voices are lost in
its thunderous roar.

In the end the early departed have no longer
need of us. One is gently weaned from things
of this world as a child outgrows the need
of its mother's breast. But we who have need
of those great mysteries, we for whom grief is
so often the source of spiritual growth,
could we exist without them?
Is the legend vain that tells of music's beginning
in the midst of the mourning for Linos?
the daring first sounds of song piercing
the barren numbness, and how in that stunned space
an almost godlike youth suddenly left forever,
and the emptiness felt for the first time
those harmonious vibrations which now enrapture
and comfort and help us.

(excerpt from  Duino Elegies: The First Elegy by Rainer Maria Rilke as translated by Albert Ernest Flemming)