The “must see” that isn’t in guidebooks on Ireland is Corcomroe Abbey. It is striking to me that—just as we had no intention of going to this remote spot but ended up there—so we had not known that today would be filled with grief over the grueling process of dying for my husband’s only sister, Jan. And so, for my own encouragement, and in honor of Jan’s battle to live in the face of death (and that of anyone else who may happen upon this blog), I dedicate these pictures and thoughts:
“We want to reach the kingdom of God, but we don’t want to travel by way of death. And yet there stands Necessity saying: ‘This way, please.’ Do not hesitate, man, to go this way, when this is the way that God came to you.” —St. Augustine
“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
“Death may be the King of terrors… but Jesus is the King of kings!” D.L. Moody
“As a well-spent day brings happy sleep, so a life well used brings happy death.” —Leonardo da Vinci (Jan is so serving of “happy” death!)
“They, then, who are destined to die, need not be careful to inquire what death they are to die, but into what place death will usher them.” —St. Augustine
“The body of Benjamin Franklin, Printer, lies here, food for worms; but the work shall not be lost, for it will appear once more in a new and more elegant edition, revised and corrected by the Author.”- Benjamin Franklin (buried in America)
“While I thought that I was learning how to live, I have been learning how to die.”—Leonardo Da Vinci
“The day which we fear as our last is but the birthday of eternity.”—Seneca
“Some day you will read in the papers that D.L. Moody of East Northfield, is dead. Don’t you believe a word of it! At that moment I shall be more alive than I am now; I shall have gone up higher, that is all, out of this old clay tenement into a house that is immortal- a body that death cannot touch, that sin cannot taint; a body fashioned like unto His glorious body.” —D.L. Moody
“Now he has departed from this strange world a little ahead of me. That signifies nothing. For us believing physicists the distinction between past, present, and future is only a stubbornly persistent illusion. ” —Albert Einstein
“The graveyards are full of indispensable men.” —Charles de Gaulle
“You’re born. You suffer. You die. Fortunately, there’s a loophole.” Billy Graham
“I am the way, the truth and the life. No one comes to the Father except through me” (John 14:6). 
“Believe in the Lord Jesus Christ, and you will be saved” (Acts 16:31)
“Let not your hearts be troubled. You believe in God; believe also in me. In my Father’s house are many rooms. If it were not so, I would have told you. I go to prepare a place for you. And if I go and prepare a place for you, I will come again and will take you to myself, that where I am you may be also.” —John 14:1-3
