Epitaph

When I die
Give what’s left of me away
To children
And old men that wait to die.
And if you need to cry,
Cry for your brother
Walking the street beside you.
And when you need me,
Put your arms
Around anyone
And give them
What you need to give to me.

I want to leave you something,
Something better
Than words
Or Sounds.

Look for me
In the people I’ve known
Or loved,
And if you cannot give me away,
At least let me live on your eyes
And not on your mind.

You can love me most
By letting
hands touch hands,
By letting
Bodies touch bodies,
And by letting go
Of children
That need to be free.

Love doesn’t die,
People do.
So, when all that’s left of me
Is love,
Give me away.

I’ll see you at home
In the earth.

-Merrit Malloy

Commentary

When I nearly died, I had a strange experience. I saw the world in crystalline clarity, as if the veil of my judgments had been lifted. I saw that everything in my life was absolutely perfect exactly as it was. I began to dissolve into a pure stream of unconditional love. Love for absolutely everything.

We all have experiences like this. In meditation, at the deathbed of a loved one, when facing our own death, when watching the sunlight turn a stream into a ribbon of stars.

Sometimes, we simply forget about them, or we store them in some rarely-visited corner of our minds. Sometimes, we allow these experiences to transform us, to change the way we live. To soften the barrier we have erected between ourselves and life.

What I Loved About “Epitaph” by Merrit Malloy

I fell in love with this poem the moment its words touched my eyes. Here are some things I loved about it:

The first few lines set up a mystery. “Give what’s left of me away / To children / And old men that wait to die.” What on earth could that mean? Surely the author can’t mean that in the literal sense. But still, we are intrigued, and we want to read further. We sense a benevolence in the author’s voice from the beginning, even if we don’t quite understand what she means.

And when you need me,
Put your arms
Around anyone
And give them
What you need to give to me.

This second stanza does an amazing trick of acrobatics. We begin in our own, private grief. “When you need me,” is tragic, because of course the speaker is gone forever. You need me, but I’m gone. “Put your arms around anyone” shifts us from needing one specific person to recognizing that something exists within all people that can respond to the deep well of grief we all carry.

“And give them / What you need to give me.” As it turns out, we don’t need the person who has died in order to get something from them. We need to give to them. And we can give to anybody, because the same kernel of love-consciousness resides in each person.

Already, the rest of the poem is captured in this stanza. We see how the author keeps directing us to the spark of love that lives within each human being, the universal presence that is alive within everyone.

You can love me most
By letting
hands touch hands,
By letting
Bodies touch bodies,
And by letting go
Of children
That need to be free.

Here, we are brought to the present. The author says, more or less, that she is present in all people. In a mystical sense, of course, this is true: we each share the same universal consciousness as the ground of our being.

The author, speaking with one foot in the next world and one foot in ours, continually draws us closer to this truth. But she doesn’t simply tell us how things are – it would be too easy to create an idea that is too abstract to touch our grief. Instead, she teaches us how to live in accordance with that truth. “By letting/ hands touch hands…”

Love doesn’t die,
People do.
So, when all that’s left of me
Is love,
Give me away.

“Love doesn’t die, / People do.” These words would do well to go on everybody’s altar or refrigerator door. Again, we are brought back to the truth of universal love, which transcends death and time. This stanza also answers the questions inspired by the first stanza. “So that’s the part of you we must give away,” we realize. “It’s love.”

We realize that we’ve been thinking of our loved one as a body and a personality. But they’re not those things. They never were. They are something far more profound, eternal. They are love. And we can find love right here.

I’ll let the poet have the last word.

I’ll see you at home
In the earth.