Yesterday in church, my friend Wendy and I were talking about a hymn we were singing, which she'd also sung at her grandmother's funeral. Oddly enough, I've been thinking about funerals ever since. Maybe that sounds weird? Or maybe just like something I'd think about, but there you have the truth: every once in awhile I find myself wondering what my funeral will be like. When my grandma Elsie died, she'd left a list of poems she wanted read at her funeral (I read an excerpt from Rubaiyat of Omar Khayyam and a sonnet from Shakespeare), and while I still carry a certain bitterness towards Grandma Elsie (because she was a reader and yet she didn't keep a journal, which in my stubbornness seems like a betrayal to both loving books and loving her posterity), I love that she loved poems enough to want them read at her funeral. Me, too.

So it works out well that today, when I am thinking about my own funeral (with the hope that it will be at least forty five or fifty years in the future), is Thomas Hardy's birthday. He is my favorite classics writer, I think because his novels feel both old and contemporary, all at the same time. Tess of the D'urbervilles (my favorite classic novel) could almost have been written yesterday. He describe his mother as a "powerful, rather than tender" woman with a "dark streak of gloom and anger," and I think the same descriptions could apply to his novels; they're not all light and angels.

What many people don't know about Hardy is that he also wrote poetry. In fact, he considered it to be a superior form of art, more important than novels. Not a few of his poems were written out of the grief and guilt he had over his estrangement with his first wife. But my favorite poem of his, "Afterward," is the one I'd want read at my funeral:

When the Present has latched its postern behind my tremulous stay,
And the May month flaps its glad green leaves like wings,
Delicate-filmed as new-spun silk, will the neighbors say,
"He was a man who used to notice such things"?

If it be in the dusk, when, like an eyelid's soundless blink,
The dewfall-hawk comes crossing the shades to alight
Upon the wind-warped upland thorn, a gazer may think,
"To him this must have been a familiar sight."

If I pass during some nocturnal blackness, mothy and warm,
When the hedgehog travels furtively over the lawn,
One may say, "He strove that such innocent creatures should come to no harm,
But he could do little for them; and now he is gone."

If, when hearing that I have been stilled at last, they stand at the door,
Watching the full-starred heavens that winter sees,
Will this thought rise on those who will meet my face no more,
"He was one who had an eye for such mysteries"?

And will any say when my bell of quittance is heard in the gloom,
And a crossing breeze cuts a pause in its outrollings,
Till they rise again, as they were a new bell's boom,
"He hears it not now, but used to notice such things"?

I love this poem for lots of reasons (could there be a lovelier image than May flapping "its glad green leaves like wings"?), but namely for two reasons. One, it illustrates the observant nature a real poet possesses---the inherent habit of noticing the small things. And two, because of the amount of yearning in the poem, a desire to be remembered for being observant and careful and in love with the natural world. Obviously I respond to that yearning because it is something I share with Hardy---my desire to notice the things of the earth because I love them, and for people to know that I loved them so that they, too, will love them. And that is a way of being remembered.

Maybe this seems like a gloomy topic, especially for this gorgeous new-June day we're having. But really: it's not about gloom at all. It's about looking forward, about hoping that one day I'll have granddaughters (and grandsons, too!) who also like poems, and will love that I loved them, too, and because they love poems they won't forget that I also loved the world.