Consolations

Death is leaving behind what you have
to become what you are.
(I saw this quote years ago on a church's talking board.  I have used it many times over the years, because for some reason, it just seemed to speak truth to me) 

Death’s but a path that must be trod,
If man would ever pass to God.
                            Parnell

It is impossible that anything so natural, so necessary, and so universal as death, should ever have been designed by Providence as an evil to mankind. 
                                                                              Jonathan Swift



It is a great privilege to live, to work, to feel, to endure, to know:  to realize that one is the instrument of Deity – being used by the Maker to work out His inscrutable purposes.
from Elbert Hubbard’s Notebook