Creating Something New Out of Ashes
Some years ago, Alexander Woolcott described a scene in a New York hospital where a grief-stricken mother sat in the hospital lounge in stunned silence, tears streaming down her cheeks. She had just lost her only child, and she was gazing blindly into space while the head nurse talked to her, simply because it was the duty of the head nurse to talk in such circumstances.
“Did Mrs. Norris notice the shabby little boy sitting in the hall just next to her daughter’s room?”
No, Mrs. Norris had not noticed him.
“There,” continued the head nurse, “there is a case. That little boy’s mother is a young French woman who was brought in a week ago by ambulance from their shabby one-room apartment to which they had gravitated when they came to this country scarcely three months ago. They had lost all their people in the old country and knew nobody here. The two had only each other. Every day that lad has come and sat there from sunup to sundown in the vain hope that she would awaken and speak to him. Now, he has no home at all.”
Mrs. Norris was listening now. So the nurse went on, “Fifteen minutes ago that little mother died, dropped off like a pebble in the boundless ocean, and now it is my duty to go out and tell that little fellow that, at the age of seven, he is all alone in the world.” The head nurse paused, then turned plaintively to Mrs. Norris. “I don’t suppose,” she said hesitantly, “I don’t suppose that you would go out and tell him for me?”
What happened in the next few moments is something that you remember forever. Mrs. Norris stood up, dried her tears, went out and put her arm around the lad and led that homeless child off to her childless home, and in the darkness they both knew they had become lights to each other!
True Grief
A visitor at a zoo noticed an attendant crying quietly over in a corner. The visitor asked another attendant what the man was crying about, and he was told that one of the elephants had died. Touched by this, the visitor then asked, “I assume he must have been particularly fond of that elephant?” And the reply came back, “No, it’s not that. What he’s crying for is that he’s the one who has to dig the grave.”
Hidden Joy
A gifted public speaker was asked to recall his most difficult speaking assignment. He said, “That’s easy. It was an address I gave to the National Conference of Undertakers. The topic they gave me was ‘How to Look Sad at a Ten Thousand Dollar Funeral.’”
Sorrows in Perspective
Sorrows are often like clouds, which though black when they are passing over us, when they are past become as if they were the garments of God thrown off in purple and gold along the sky. –Henry Ward Beecher
The Night of Sorrow
Blessed to us is the night, for it reveals the stars.