COPE Parent Phyllis Weiner received this poem as a Jewish prayer for the High Holidays. “I believe it’s universal for anyone who has lost a loved one.”
It is hard to sing of oneness when our world is not complete,
when those who once brought wholeness to our life have gone,
and naught but memory can fill emptiness their passing leaves behind.
But memory can tell us what we were, in with those we loved;
it cannot help us find what each of us, alone, must now become.
Yet no one is really alone;
those who live no more still echo still within our thoughts and words,
and what they did is part of what we have become.
We do our best to pay homage to our dead when we live our lives most fully, even in the shadow of our loss.