Free According to YES by Dawn French Page B

one of the smaller side chapels, but the hubris, and the great grief of Sharpe’s widow Betty, denoted that the main aisle and big altar was the only right place. So here they sit in their drab blacks and greys, feeling puny. Thomas is aware that he is in an inevitable queue of helpless mortals, merely waiting his turn, there but for the Grace of God …
    Today is to celebrate Sharpe, his old college roommate, but like all things funereal, it reminds Thomas that he could be next, so he finds himself relieved at his reprieve and guilty for feeling so. Glad that Sharpe went first, that he has some more time himself. Then he looks around at the older ones, those in their nineties with the sallow cheeks, grey eyes, loose teeth and liver spots, and he wonders just what he’s glad for? And he looks up at the soaring ceiling and the intricate design of the huge vaults supported by the colossal stone columns, suddenly aware that they are obediently seated in the belly of an immense stone carcass, with the blanched raw ribs ascending
and enclosing above them, a mighty, gigantic cage, to remind them of how small and insignificant and temporary they all are. The renegade Canute in Thomas longs to resist it all. Then, he hears his name, and it’s time for him to climb the spiral stairs into the pulpit to say his poem loud and clear, in memory of his late friend. He looks out at the almost dead, and begins.
    ‘Holy Sonnet Number Ten by John Donne.
    Death be not proud, though some have called thee
    Mighty and dreadful, for thou art not so;
    For those whom thou think’st thou dost overthrow
    Die not, poor Death, nor yet canst thou kill me …’
    Thomas is a good public speaker, that’s why he’s been asked, but today his voice is thinner than usual, he fears he might falter. Why? Because frankly, he’s not sure he believes this poem. It sounds great, he’s heard it at a thousand funerals, it works, but what really is Thomas saying? The poem seems to be insisting that death has no right to be proud, because apparently human beings don’t die, they live eternally. Yeah. Right.
    ‘From rest and sleep, which but thy pictures be,
    Much pleasure; then from thee much more must flow,
    And soonest our best men with thee do go.
    Rest of their bones and soul’s delivery.’
    ‘And soonest our best men with thee do go’? Sharpe was one of those ‘best men’, and Sharpe was younger than Thomas. ‘
Bones and souls’? He doesn’t want to be bones and souls, he wants to be flesh and heart and laugh and kiss and sing …
    ‘Thou art slave to fate, chance, kings and desperate men.
    And dost with poison, warm and sickness dwell;
    And poppy or charms can make us sleep as well
    And better than thy stroke, why swell’st thou then?’
    So … What? … death is a cowardly slave who just depends on luck, accidents, decrees, murder, disease and war to kill men? OK, death may hide inside all of these, but it’s still DEATH. Death is in charge, and it took Sharpe. In a long slow agonizingly cruel cancerous way. And it might come for Thomas next. It’s horrific, and there’s nothing he can do …
    ‘One short sleep past, we wake eternally.
    And death shall be no more: Death, thou shalt die.’
    No! It’s not a short sleep if you don’t believe all that afterlife crap. That’s it. FINITO.
    Death doesn’t die, John Donne, we do. All of us die, Thomas thinks: the clever, the lucky, the poor, the pretty, the ugly, the wealthy. Just the same as the ignorant, the greedy, the evil. We leave it all, good and bad, behind us. Thomas refuses to buy the notion that death is some kind of High Calling, will glorify us for all eternity. It’s not, it’s THE END.
    Why the hell did he choose this poem? He apologizes to Sharpe in his deepest heart, and as he steps down from the pulpit, Thomas knows what he must do. He must escape from the carcass, and he must live whatever time he has left with
significance. He wants to love, and as he strides straight