I am standing on the seashore.  A ship at my side spreads her white sails to the morning breeze and starts for the blue ocean.  She is an object of beauty and strength, and I stand and watch her until at length she is a speck of white cloud just where the sea and sky come to mingle with each other.

Then someone at my side says, "There!  She's gone!"  Gone where?   Gone from my sight, that is all.  She is just as large in mast and hull and spar as she was when she left my side, and she is just as able to bear her load of living weight to her destined harbor.

Her diminished size is in me, not in her.  And just at the moment when someone at my side says, There!  She's gone! there are other eyes watching her coming, and other voices ready to take up the glad shout, "There she comes!"

And that is dying.

-- Henry Jackson van Dyke