A member of my faculty recently succumbed to a terribly aggressive liver cancer. He found out about it a week before the start of classes, and now, about one month later, it has taken his life.
He was a brilliant trumpet player and a mentor truly loved by his students.
Nobody on these boards knows him, but the reason I'm posting this is because members might enjoy this quotation which one of his family members posted to accompany the news of Dr Ewald's passing.
I am standing upon the seashore. A ship at my side spreads her white sails to the morning breeze and starts for the blue ocean. She is an object of beauty and strength. I stand and watch her until at length she hangs like a speck of white cloud just where the sea and sky come to mingle with each other.
Then someone at my side says: "There, she is gone!"
"Gone where?"
Gone from my sight. That is all. She is just as large in mast and hull and spar as she was when she left my side and she is just as able to bear the load of living freight to her destined port.
Her diminished size is in me, not in her. And just at the moment when someone at my side says: "There, she is gone!" There are other eyes watching her coming, and other voices ready to take up the glad shout: "Here she comes!"
And that is dying
-Henry Van Dyke
