Bereavement

“ Death comes in an instant and changes that bright creature in her white and rich attire into a black-robed mourner. He takes off the bridal ornaments and clothes her with the colours of bereavement. There is darkness in the once cheerful room, and the waiting-women sing their long dirges. ”

“ The gloom of death has been heightened by artificial means. Mourning dresses, solemn faces, funeral addresses, the grave,—all have had an unnatural depth of awe added to the natural sense of bereavement. ”

“ I pray that Our Heavenly Father may assuage the anguish of your bereavement and leave you only the cherished memory of the loved and lost and the solemn pride that must be yours to have laid so costly a sacrifice upon the altar of freedom. ”

“ And now with more of submission under their affliction, with much of hope that cheered even in the midst of their bereavement, they will see their child laid in the funeral-vault to meet their eyes no more until the resurrection morning—and with chastened hearts, and more thoughtfully they will tread the path set before them, feeling convinced and thankful that sorrow has taught them a lesson of wisdom they never could have learned in a life like that they had lived. ”

“ Always susceptible of sympathy, and alive to the voices of kindred spirits, in her trials she feels their indispensable necessity. How are her affections knit to each relative, by adversity, disappointment, and death. In bereavement a family build, as it were, a single monument, each placing its tribute in the mournful structure. They lean on one another, and, thanks be to God, next to his own strong arm, there is none so dear in our grief, as that of a friend. ”

“ But the so-called mediums have a strong hold on the sympathies of those who mourn the loss of friends; in the sorrows of bereavement, when thought like a fermenting fluid is ready for a chemical change, they turn the gushing emotions into the belief they are not separated, and this consolation comes to the mourner like heaven's benediction, gaining a strong foothold in the minds of millions. ”

“ In all the agony of bereavement, some were beating their breasts, and invoking the departed in piercing tones of anguish, while others, prostrated beside graves which had evidently not been long closed over the dead, called in the most endearing terms that the glowing imaginations of these children of the sun can suggest on the lost friend or relative to wait for them. ”

“ That we tender to the family and friends of the deceased our sincere condolence and sympathy in their sore bereavement, but whilst sensible that words, however truly uttered, cannot compensate for the loss of such a husband, father, and guide, we do find both for ourselves and for them, consolation in the belief that his peaceful end was but the prelude to the bliss of Heaven. ”

“ And so, death brings with it sorrow and misery. Those of us who are most directly concerned can think of no rules of etiquette, no customs of good society, when we are suffering a deep bereavement. We think only of our great loss, and of our great sorrow. ”

“ Now let me advise all who would comfort people in a new bereavement to talk to them, very freely, all they can, in this way of the dead. They will engage in it with interest, they will talk of their own recollections of the dead, and listen to yours, though they become sometimes pleasant, sometimes even laughable. ”

“ God will raise her up." In our weakness and blindness, we could see no mercy nor wisdom in this terrible bereavement, this scorching desolation of the already heavily-stricken servant of the Most High. ”

“ We go into a house of mourning, and are almost scandalized by its cheerfulness, forgetting that whereas to us the bereavement is the one salient fact, to the bereaved there is the necessity of taking up afresh the threads of their lives. Food must be prepared even while the corpse lies under the roof, and the common daily round of duty stands still for no human affliction. ”

“ Unacquainted with grief, I knew not how to appraise my bereavement; I could not rightly estimate the strength of the stroke. ”

“ People of sense, of course, manage to dress without going to extremities in either direction. We see many a pale-faced mourner whose quiet mourning-dress tells the story of bereavement without giving us the painful feeling that crape is too thick, or bombazine too heavy, for comfort. Exaggeration is to be deprecated in mourning as in everything. ”

“ And, as spiritual beings, placed here not to be gratified, but to be trained, surely we know that often it is the drawing up of these earthly ties that draws up our souls; that a great bereavement breaks the crust of our mere animal consciousness, and inaugurates a spiritual faith ”

“ We were very sorry to read of your bereavement in the loss of your ————. Our prayer is that you may find great consolation in the thought that some day, in God’s own good time, you shall see ———— again. ”

“ Reader! if thou art one of these careworn ones, the days of thy mourning are numbered! A few more throbbings of this aching heart, and then the angel who proclaims “time,” shall proclaim also, sorrow, and sighing, and mourning, to “be no longer!” Seek now to mourn thy sins more than thy sorrows; reserve thy bitterest tears for forgetfulness of thy dear Lord. The saddest and sorest of all bereavements, is when the sins which have separated thee from Him, evoke the anguish-cry, “Where is my God?” ”

“ My heart smote me not a little as I saw that not less than one-half the congregation wore the badge of bereavement. There was a widow with her fatherless children; feeble age tottered on missing the strong arm of manhood on which it had been accustomed to lean; little children, motherless, walked with demure steps by their father's side; and there a lonely couple thinking of the little ones that used to follow them with dancing steps.
"'What a wretched, suffering world it is!' and I [Pg 338] bowed my head upon my hands and wept, the first tears I had shed since they took my baby from my arms. ”

“ Invitations to those in mourning should be sent as a matter of course, except during the first few weeks of deep bereavement, when their sorrows are not to be intruded upon by the gayeties of the outer world. ”

“ When we look at our bereavements in this light, and think of what death means to our beloved ones who have been taken from us, we find new comfort in the thought of their immortality, their release from suffering and temptation, and their full blessedness with Christ. It is selfish for us to forget this in the absorption of our own grief. Should we not be willing to endure loss and pain that those dear to us may receive gain and blessing? ”

“ The fact that professional mourners were hired for funeral occasions indicates that mourning was a ritual, not an evidence of sorrow. Moderns may mourn the dead out of respect and because of bereavement, but the ancients did this because of fear. ”

“ In fact, there was a succession of bereavements, which caused her to say in her Journal, "Sorrow upon Sorrow!" and after writing the long list of deaths, she closes the entry with these words "O gracious Lord! bless and sanctify to us all this afflicting trial, and cause it to work for our everlasting good; and be very near to the widow and the fatherless; and may we all be drawn nearer to Thee, and Thy kingdom of rest and peace, where there will be no more sin, sickness, death, and sorrow." ”

“ She was always in mourning, yet the day he came back from the longest absence he had yet made her appearance immediately told him she had lately had a bereavement. They met on this occasion as she was leaving the church, so that postponing his own entrance he instantly offered to turn round and walk away with her. ”

“ The very bereavements which are most dreaded and deplored as utterly irreparable, are the most certain to be repaired, and often by those who before neither knew themselves nor were known to be capable of such momentous charge and duty. ”

“ They little know, who coldly talk of the poor man’s bereavements, as a happy release from pain to the departed, and a merciful relief from expense to the survivor—they little know, I say, what the agony of those bereavements is. ”

“ Now in all these bereavements of the Christian home we have developed the wisdom and goodness of God; and the consideration of this we commend to the bereaved as a great comfort. They are but the execution of God’s merciful design concerning the family. Pious parents can, therefore, bless the Lord for these afflictions. It is often well for both you and your children that bereavements come. They come often as the ministers of grace. The tendency of home is to confine its supreme affections within itself, and not yield them unto God. ”

“ Even her very tears had ceased to flow. Oh! gaze no more, sad soul, towards the west, where stands the house of mourning all behung with funeral crape; nor to the east, upon the grave and house of death. For this one day, turn thy sad gaze away from that drear charnel house where the loved corpse is laid, so that the cool night breeze may fan and wake him from his sleep earlier than if he were shut up within the narrow grave! Yet, no! bereaved one, gaze thy fill on thy beloved one while he still is here, and ere he falls to dust—and steep thy heart deep in the eternal woe. ”

“ At your death-bed how boldly might we comfort and encourage your departing souls! And at your burial, how comfortably might we leave you in the grave, in expectation to meet your souls in heaven, and to see your bodies raised to that glory! ”

“ Feed Thou the hungry and lighten their sorrow,
Grant them the sunshine of hope for the morrow;
They are Thy children, their trust is on high:
Hear Thou the poor that cry!
4 Dry Thou the mourner’s tear!
Heal Thou the wounds of time-hallowed affection;
Grant to the widow and orphan protection;
Be in their trouble a friend ever near;
Dry Thou the mourner’s tear!
[382]
6 Hear, Father, hear our prayer!
Long hath Thy goodness our footsteps attended;
Be with the pilgrim whose journey is ended:
When at Thy summons for death we prepare,
Hear, Father, hear our prayer! ”

“ A funeral train comes gliding by your bed, in which Passion and Feeling assume bodily shape, and things of the mind become dim spectres to the eye. There is your earliest Sorrow, a pale young mourner, wearing a sister's likeness to first love, sadly beautiful, with a hallowed sweetness in her melancholy features, and grace in the flow of her sable robe. ”

“ You may talk and talk to the grief-stricken one who bends over the corpse in the coffin about death being a transition from a world of woe to a world of weal, and the distressed one may try to cherish the thought and proclaim belief, but the tears cease not to flow, the pain and anguish written upon every feature of the mourner refuse to give place to joy and gladness. ”

“ Then, while the funeral dirge fills the sacred edifice, and the mournful Dies Iræ thrills the hearts of all, each one thinks of his own departed ones, and recalls with indescribable sadness other just such celebrations in the years long past, when those for whom they now invoke the mercy of Heaven were still amongst the living. Then comes, too, the solemn thought that some, perhaps many, of those then present in life and health may be numbered with the dead before All Souls' Day comes round again, and a voice from the depths of the Christian heart asks, "May not I, too, be then with the dead?" ”

“ To hold a common scorn of death!
And at a burial to hear
⁠The creaking cords which wound and eat
Into my human heart, whene'er
Earth goes to earth, with grief, not fear,
⁠With hopeful grief, were passing sweet! ”

“ The poor are accustomed to mourn, the graciously poor mourn graciously. We are apt to think, Blessed are the merry; but Christ, who was himself a great mourner, says, Blessed are the mourners. There is a sinful mourning, which is an enemy to blessedness— the sorrow of the world; despairing melancholy upon a spiritual account, and disconsolate grief upon a temporal account. There is a natural mourning, which may prove a friend to blessedness, by the grace of God working with it, and sanctifying the afflictions to us, for which we mourn. ”

“ Every one knows the soul-subduing pathos of the funeral service, for who is so fortunate as never to have followed some one he has loved to the tomb? But when performed over the remains of innocence and beauty, thus laid low in the bloom of existence, what can be more affecting? At that simple but most solemn consignment of the body to the grave-“Earth to earth, ashes to ashes, dust to dust!”—the tears of the youthful companions of the deceased flowed unrestrained. ”

“ What happens in our graves poisons our thoughts together with our bodies. The figure of death, in the imagination of men, depends before all upon the form of burial; and the funeral rites govern not only the fate of those who depart but also the happiness of those who stay, for they raise in the ultimate background of life the great image upon which men’s eyes linger in consolation or despair. ”

“ The bodies of the dead can only be seen, or the cries of the dying heard for a single day, but many days shall not put an end to the mourning of a parent for a beloved son, the joy and support of his age, or of the widow and helpless offspring for a father, taken away in the fulness of health and vigour. ”

“ Forget! what spell can calm the soul?
Should memory o'er its pulses roll
Through almost every night of grief,
We still hope for the morrow;
But what to those can bring relief,
Who pine in endless sorrow.
—EMMA TUCKER.
LINES WRITTEN ON THE PROSPECT OF DEATH.
Sad solitary thought! ”

“ The pious tones which once with a holy inspiration had gushed from the pure fount of his soul—tones to which he had himself listened in silent devotion but a few weeks before,—resounded now in mourning over his grave; and sad and sorrowful, though at the same time sweetly consolatory, still echo far and wide to the hearts of all:
“Blessed are the dead, who die in the Lord, now and for ever. ”

“ The Saviour meets the sorrowing one,
And they that bear the bier stand still,
The voice of grief is hushed in awe,
And all in silence wait His will.
The “Man of Sorrows” sees her woe,
He who knew grief, for grief can feel;
Weep not, thou mourner, Christ is near,
As Man to pity, God to heal. ”