HOW DOES IT HAPPEN?

How does it happen when we die?

Do we all move in a crowd towards God?

Thomas Merton pictured crowds of people

like prisoners or displaced people being

moved from station to station from far

countries - all those people who died this

night from all around the world. He

pictured Hemingway - walking that walk -

shuffling those steps - after he shot himself.

How does it happen? What happens next?

Do all these little kids crowd

around Adam Lanza and hold him till he

lets go of whatever it was that killed him

and them. I don’t know how all this

horrible stuff happens. Like everyone

I don’t know how someone could kill a child

or anyone else, including themselves.

How does it happen? How, God, how?

© Andy Costello, Reflections, 2012

   AN ELEGY FOR ERNEST HEMINGWAY

Now for the first time on the night of your death

your name is mentioned in convents, ne cadas in

obscurum.

Now with a true bell your story becomes final. 
Now men in monasteries, men of requiems,

familiar with the dead, include you in their offices.

You just stand anonymous among thousands, 
waiting in the dark at great stations 
on the edge of countries known to prayer alone, 
where fires are not merciless, we hope, 
and not without end.

You pass briefly through our midst. 
Your books and writings 
have not been consulted. 
Our prayers are pro defuncto N.

Yet some look up, as though 
among a crowd of prisoners

or displaced persons, they recognized 

a friend once known in a far country. 

For these the sun also rose 

after a forgotten war 
upon an idiom you made great. 

They have not forgotten you. 

In their silence you are still famous, 
no ritual shade.

How slowly this bell tolls in a monastery tower 
for a whole age, and for the quick death 
of an unready self!

For with one shot the whole hunt is ended!

- Thomas Merton ©