"Death is a transformation- perhaps a bit more radical than puberty...Death is not sad; the sad thing is that most people don't ever really live at all."
-Socrates, Way of the Peaceful Warrior
He looked up, greeted me, and said casually, "Joseph died this morning." I fell back against the station wagon behind me, sick at the news of Joseph's death and Soc's callousness.-Way of the Peaceful Warrior by Dan Millman, pg 137
Finally, I was able to speak. "How did he die?"
"Oh, very well, I imagine," Socrates smiled. "He had leukemia, you see. Joseph had been ill for a number of years; he hung in there for a long time. Fine warrior, that one." He spoke with affection, but almost casually, without a trace of sorrow.
"Socrates, aren't you upset, just a little?" He laid the wrench down.
"That reminds me of a story I heard a long time ago, about a mother who was overcome with grief by the death of her young son.
'I can't bear the pain and sorrow,' she told her sister.
'My sister, did you mourn your son before he was born?'
'No, of course not,' the despondent woman replied.
'Well then, you need not mourn for him now. He has only returned to the same place, his original home, before he was ever born.' "
‘How does one become a butterfly?’ she asked pensively.
‘You must want to fly so much that you are willing to give up being a caterpillar.’
‘You mean to die?’ asked Yellow, remembering the three who fell out of the sky.
‘Yes and No,’ he answered. ‘What looks like you will die but what’s really you will still live. Life is changed, not taken away. Isn’t that different from those who die without ever becoming butterflies?’
-Trina Paulus, Hope for the Flowers
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