For Whom the Bell Tolls
by John Donne: http://www.yourdailypoem.com/listpoem.jsp?poem_id=2118

“No man is an island,
Entire of itself.
Each is a piece of the continent,
A part of the main.
If a clod be washed away by the sea,
Europe is the less.
As well as if a promontory were.
As well as if a manor of thine own
Or of thine friend’s were.
Each man’s death diminishes me,
For I am involved in mankind.
Therefore, send not to know
For whom the bell tolls,
It tolls for thee.”

Please believe me that I don’t want to be a sad messenger here but just an ambassador of faith.

It has just reminded me of this poem, which I and many others would know this from the novel; For Whom the Bell Tolls  by Ernest Hemingway when I got to know the sad news about my wife’s brother who had died the night before.

He was ill I must add this here; he was actually an unlucky boy; born as the last child (my wife has or had ten siblings) of a working-class family, with a humpback and was also epileptic. It was not enough, he had often got hardly beating by drunk father now and then.

Anyway, he’d grown up with his miserable fortune and became also an alcoholic, like his father. When I’ve got to know him I was a professional musician and he became a true fan of mine!

In any case, he’d lived alone in the supervised home almost all his life and after getting some hard psychological seizure, he had brought to a hospital till his last hours.

Of course, his death was not a loss in our life because of fewer connections in the last years, and when I’ve got the news by my wife, I’ve just thought; it was surely as a salvation or redemption for him at last. Truly, I wish I never live in this condition!

It just remembers me when I was in the hospital with my brother in almost a state of coma for about ten days, and I have mentioned in the last day his hands and feet getting thicker, I asked the nurse; what’s happening? His body doesn’t work well anymore, she said. Then I got to the balcony at the very evening to smoke a cigarette; I just tell heartily; Oh my lord, please take him to you. Don’t let his beautiful body get worst, save his beautiful soul, take him now!

Then, in the same night he’d died. ❤ ❤