Bereavement - and Love

The following was extracted from the reading given at St Thomas's Church, in New York, by the Prime Minister at the memorial service for British victims of the World Trade Centre attacks.

 

"There is no reading, there are no words, that can truly comfort those who are grieving the loss of their loved ones today; and no matter how we try to make sense of it all it is hard, so hard, to do..."

 

"...For my reading I have chosen the final words of The Bridge of San Luis Rey written by Thornton Wilder in 1927. It is about a tragedy that took place in Peru, when a bridge collapsed over a gorge and five people died...

 

"A witness to the deaths, wanting to make sense of them and explain the ways of God to his fellow human beings, examined the lives of the people who died, and these words were said by someone who knew the victims, and who had been through the many emotions, and the many stages, of bereavement and loss:

 

But soon we will die,
and all memories of those five will have left earth,
and we ourselves shall be loved for a while and forgotten.

 

But the love will have been enough;
all those impulses of love return to the love that made them.

 

Even memory is not necessary for love.

 

There is a land of the living and a land of the dead,
and the bridge is love.

 

The only survival, the only meaning."