Uphill idealist

The following reading was w ritten by Henry Scott Holland (27 January 1847 – 17 March 1918) was Regius Professor of Divinity at the University of Oxford... My friend Sarah shared this reading with me earlier today and I can't quite articulate why it cut me to the quick, but it did. Death is something that we often want to separate from daily life. We remove ourselves - or try to - from grief. But death and life are married. Death and life can't be separated. While I don't know the ways that death or loss have impacted you life,  I do know that death has impacted and continues to impact me. But death is a part of life that I can't live without - like the quote states... "death is nothing at all...All is well."

So once upon a time, there was this kid who thought nothing they did was right, mattered or did anything but cause problems. This kid was sometimes called a boat rocker. It's not like this kid, we'll call him Joe, ran the streets or anything. It's just that 'Joe' always had a question, thought about things in ways others didn't, and had a hard time with algebra. These differences were just enough to place Joe in that space of being, or thinking he was an outsider. There was a time in Joe's family that was really difficult. His sister had died after a long illness and had left the family numb and grieving. His sister was a great person. She was always kind, never a challenge and even though she had trouble with math too - she was so genuinely good, most people never noticed. Months had passed after his sister's death, and Joe came to the point in his grief that he wondered why he, the boat-rocker, had not been the one to be taken. Since his sister's d...