Death Is Nothing at All
Words from a sermon by Henry Scott Holland, read at many funerals: I have only slipped away into the next room.
At a glance
- Length, read slowly
- About 2 minutes
- Where it goes
- Reading · Celebration of lifeRead by: family or friends
Death is nothing at all. It does not count. I have only slipped away into the next room. Nothing has happened. Everything remains exactly as it was. I am I, and you are you, and the old life that we lived so fondly together is untouched, unchanged. Whatever we were to each other, that we are still. Call me by the old familiar name. Speak of me in the easy way which you always used. Put no difference into your tone. Wear no forced air of solemnity or sorrow. Laugh as we always laughed at the little jokes that we enjoyed together. Play, smile, think of me, pray for me. Let my name be ever the household word that it always was. Let it be spoken without an effort, without the ghost of a shadow upon it. Life means all that it ever meant. It is the same as it ever was. There is absolute and unbroken continuity. What is this death but a negligible accident? Why should I be out of mind because I am out of sight? I am but waiting for you, for an interval, somewhere very near, just round the corner. All is well. Nothing is hurt; nothing is lost. One brief moment and all will be as it was before. How we shall laugh at the trouble of parting when we meet again!
Henry Scott Holland
What the poem says
The speaker has died and talks to the people left behind as if from the next room. Nothing between us has changed, he says. Keep using my name, keep the old jokes, do not lower your voice. Death is a short interval, and we will laugh about the trouble of parting when we meet again. It is prose, not verse, but families read it as a poem.
When it fits
It suits a service where the family wants to speak of the deceased with a smile, and a celebration of life more than a formal church funeral. A church family hears faith in the promised reunion; a family without church hears the wish to go on living as before. Some mourners find the opening line too easy after a sudden or early death. Remember gives grief more room, and Crossing the Bar keeps the hope but says it more quietly.
Reading it aloud
A close friend, a sibling or an adult child reads it, often after the eulogy or during the sharing of memories. Read it as speech: natural pauses, a steady voice, no rush at "All is well." It takes about ninety seconds. One tip: practice the last sentence, the one that most often catches in the throat. In the funeral program it fits on one page.
About the poet and the text
Henry Scott Holland was a canon of St Paul's Cathedral in London and later a professor at Oxford. He preached these words in May 1910, after the death of King Edward VII, in a sermon called The King of Terrors. We copied them from Facts of the Faith, the 1919 collection of his sermons published by Longmans, Green and checked against the page scan.
Goes well with
- Crossing the BarTennyson's calm farewell, for a family that also wants a poem with the sea and faith in it.
- Romans 8: nothing can separate us from the love of GodRomans 8:35-39Paul's assurance that nothing separates us from God's love, next to Holland's promise that nothing is lost.
- John 11: I am the resurrection and the lifeJohn 11:21-27Jesus tells Martha that whoever believes will live, the ground under Holland's hope.
- Ecclesiastes 3: a time for everythingEcclesiastes 3:1-8A time to weep and a time to laugh, for a service that makes room for both.