After the first day of November in which we honor all the saints of heaven, the Church turns its attention to the dead. The whole month is designated to remember those who have crossed the threshold of life eternal.

Saint Francis of Assisi offered poetic words on the idea of death. He said that death is

neither an enemy to be overcome nor a fate to be accepted but rather a friend, a kinsman, to be received with all courtesy.

While Francis gives us the image of death as friend, Mary Oliver offers another perspective in Poem 102:

When death comes
like the hungry bear in autumn;
when death comes and takes all the bright coins from his purse to buy me, and snaps the purse shut …

I want to step through the door full of curiosity, wondering: what is it going to be like, that cottage of darkness?

And therefore I look upon everything
as a brotherhood and a sisterhood,
and I look upon time as no more than an idea, and I consider eternity as another possibility,

and I think of each life as a flower, as common as a field daisy, and as singular,

and each name a comfortable music in the mouth, tending, as all music does, toward silence, and each body a lion of courage, and something precious to the earth.

When it’s over, I want to say: all my life I was a bride married to amazement. I was the bridegroom, taking the world into my arms.

When it’s over, I don’t want to wonder if I have made of my life something particular, and real. I don’t want to find myself sighing and frightened, or full of argument.

I don’t want to end up simply having visited this world.

Mary Oliver embraces death as the culmination of a life lived as a bride who was filled with amazement or the bridegroom who embraced everything life offered. When death comes, there is a desire to pass death’s door filled with curiosity.

What will it be like? I have no idea. Yet, this month is a fitting time to visit the cemetery and remember those who have gone before us. Such visits keep us humble, remind us that we are made for eternity. May we live life well so that when death arrives we may fall into the arms of Love and never consider this life as a place we visited, but a gift that we treasured.