With my complaining out of the way, I went in the office and checked my email where I found an email message from a high school friend. She had sent it to everyone on the Class of Sixty email list. She simply said that S.J. Mills, one of our classmates, had passed away an hour earlier.
I read it again, and then I thought about the message. I thought about S.J., and I began thinking about the term - Passed Away. I've said it often enough. I know what it means. But since I read Jackie's email, I been thinking and what I think is, I've never appreciated the significance and the beauty of the term before now. One of the first things we learn when we start figuring out things on our own is that we are going to pass away. We are going to stop living in the form we've lived in, and we'll stop playing an active part in the life we've we've been participating in - I understand that, but now I sense the deeper meaning of the phrase.
When we say that someone passed away, we are saying two things whether it was our intention to say two things or not. When one passes away from one place, they are passing to another place. Life never ends. Though we have no memory of it, we were somewhere before we were born here. Wherever that was I'll bet the phrase passed away was used to describe our absence there when we left to live here for a while on our way on a glorious celestial voyage.
S.J. Mills came here from another place, I know not where, and now he has gone to another place and again, I know not where. But I do know that wherever that other place is, it will be a better, happier, more joyous place because S.J. is there. Thinking about you Buddy.
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