If I be the first of us to die,<br>Let grief not blacken long your sky.<br>Be bold yet modest in your grieving.<br>There is a change but not a leaving.<br>For just as death is part of life,<br>The dead live on forever in the living.<br>And all the gathered riches of our journey,<br>The moments shared, the mysteries explored,<br>The steady layering of intimacy stored,<br>The things that made us laugh or weep or sing,<br>The joy of sunlit snow or first unfurling of the spring,<br>The wordless language of look and touch,<br>The knowing,<br>Each giving and each taking,<br>These are not flowers that fade,<br>Nor trees that fall and crumble,<br>Nor are they stone,<br>For even stone cannot the wind and rain withstand<br>And mighty mountain peaks in time reduce to sand.<br>What we were, we are.<br>What we had, we have.<br>A conjoined past imperishably present.<br>So when you walk the wood where once we walkedtogether<br>And scan in vain the dappled bank beside you for my shadow,<br>Or pause where we always did upon the hill to gaze across the land,<br>And spotting something, reach by habit for my hand,<br>And finding none, feel sorrow start to steal upon you,<br>Be still.<br>Close your eyes.<br>Breathe.<br>Listen for my footfall in your heart.<br>I am not gone but merely walk within you.