My wife’s maternal grandfather has died. I told her I was sorry and she said that she was not. Not because she is a callous woman, but because life left him some time ago and he lived on. There comes to all of us an end and a beginning of that long rest.

I wonder if my dying will be quiet, a lingering on to see that old friend the sun shining on a changeless world, to hear the rain murmuring on the last evening of my life? I am a conservative and the thought of going beyond the sunlight and the sound of rain, though I know there must be things better, is a melancholy thought. Death, after all, is a melancholy thing. Perhaps it is something tragically Greek that arises in us in the consideration of concluding anything that is good—those agelessly Greeks of the youth of our civilization.

I have none of the English dread to cease existing, that modern dread symptomatic of our civilization’s age and death. I don’t believe I shall ever cease existing, but that is not why I don’t have the dread. I don’t have the dread because like Job it has seemed to me an attractive alternative never to have existed to begin with. It may be a misunderstanding on my part, when it comes to that English horror of which Larkin had so much. Perhaps he would agree with Job. Of course, it is ingratitude on my part, for I have been not only happy, but very happy, and I wonder if lying on my last bed I could refuse at last any of the experiences of life with so much variety and even in the worst of it the exuberance of vitality? Perhaps that is the power of age, its realm: the realm in which variety and vitality can no longer be recognized, for when we are young we suffer as the young do, and it may not be like the suffering of the old.

Of old age Matthew Arnold wrote:

Deep in our hidden heart
Festers the dull remembrance of a change,
But no emotion none.

And it may have been the horror of this that drove Dylan Thomas to rage, rage against the dying of the light. It is a true poem, but I wonder at the wisdom of it. What is the aspect of that truth in which we see the light of wisdom?

Do not go gentle into that good night,
Old age should burn and rave at close of day;
Rage, rage against the dying of the light.

And you, my father, there on the sad height,
Curse, bless me now with your fierce tears, I pray.
Do not go gentle into that good night.
Rage, rage against the dying of the light.

It is the impotence of youth before old age, a villainelle as cyclical as it is Greek, and it is true. I think it is also this: that all this leads to the conclusion that there must be more life after death. It is an existential truth that Thomas speaks, but without the hope that it is more. And it is coupled with the undeniable fact that we are limited, that we are creatures, and that we are not in charge. We lie on our beds and die, and there our withered hearts are drained of what would make us rage since the life is draining out of them, those old hourglasses. What does it matter what kind of men we were if we regret our life and do not regret our death?

But that is how we ought to die.

What is thy only comfort in life and death?

That I with body and soul, both in life and death, am not my own, but belong unto my faithful Saviour Jesus Christ; who, with his precious blood, has fully satisfied for all my sins, and delivered me from all the power of the devil; and so preserves me that without the will of my heavenly Father, not a hair can fall from my head; yea, that all things must be subservient to my salvation, and therefore, by his Holy Spirit, He also assures me of eternal life, and makes me sincerely willing and ready, henceforth, to live unto him.

How many things are necessary for thee to know, that thou, enjoying this comfort, mayest live and die happily?

Three; the first, how great my sins and miseries are; the second, how I may be delivered from all my sins and miseries; the third, how I shall express my gratitude to God for such deliverance.

On the last afternoon of life (O let there be the sunlight slanting through the window, and the midnight rain of departure) death will meet me with the inevitability of the motion of the planets. Perhaps God’s gift is old age, and weary, withered hearts, so that we can go gentle in to that good night holding both the melancholy and anticipation; and here is how:

The sands of time are sinking,
The dawn of heaven breaks;
The summer morn I’ve sighed for -
The fair, sweet morn awakes:
Dark, dark had been the midnight
But dayspring is at hand,
And glory, glory dwelleth
In Emmanuel’s land.

The bride eyes not her garment,
But her dear Bridegroom’s face;
I will not gaze at glory
But on my King of grace.
Not at the crown He giveth
But on His pierced hand;
The Lamb is all the glory
Of Emmanuel’s land.

Better than sunlight is the light of the glory of God, and better than the sound of rain or the meaningless roar of the sea—which has called, has called us to another shore—is the sound of the waters of the river of life streaming forever after he says, Ecce, nova facio omnia!