mourning ritual Quotes

I always take photographs when I attend a funeral. Most people there know who I am and expect me to be there with my camera.

Two turtle doves will show thee Where my cold ashes lie And sadly murmuring tell thee How in tears I did die

A voice hissed: "He sheds tears!" It was taken around the ring "Usal gives moisture to the dead!" He felt fingers touch his damp cheek, heard the awed whispers.

I envy my Jewish friends the ritual of saying kaddish - a ritual that seems perfectly conceived, with its built-in support group and its ceremonious designation of time each day devoted to remembering the lost person.

On the fortieth day after his death, we held the ceremony, and I performed for the very first time.

It's not sipping wine. It's a mourning wine. You drain it. Like this.

To say this sacred prayer [the Kaddish, prayer for the dead] for a Gentile is a most uncommon proceeding, but so unanimous and ardent is the feeling of the people of the New York ghetto in the present instance that Pres. William McKinley is spoken of in that quarter as "the loving brother of all of us," as one who "died a martyr to the freedom of Jew and Gentile.

Yes, yes, I'm coming. Right up the top of the house. One moment I'll linger. How the mud goes round in the mind-what a swirl these monsters leave, the waters rocking, the weeds waving and green here, black there, striking to the sand, till by degrees the atoms reassemble, the deposit sifts itself, and a gain through the eyes one sees clear and still, and there comes to the lips some prayer for the departed, some obsequy for the souls of those one nods to, the one never meets again.

When a soldier of the night's watch dies they say, "And now his watch is over." That's what they say when a comedian dies. They go, "And now his tour is done."