I Saw You on the Bed of Death — In Mourning for the Late Elias al-Khoury al-Makdisi

I saw you laid out on the bed of death like a gentle lamb, doom having closed your eyelids, while I stood among a chosen band of brothers wavering between doubt and certainty.

They keep vigil with you, gazing at you, thunderstruck by the horror of the calamity; their steady hearts were crushed, and they started up from their places, dazed and bewildered, calling to you, the burning tear wandering lost in their eyes.

But there you are: silence and stillness have settled upon you, calm has enfolded you, and the innocent smile is drawn upon your lips, like a pure angel who lit up the bridal canopies and then lay down on his soft bed to rest, well pleased and well pleasing.

It is a grievous blow, one that rends our hearts with something like a deep upheaval: the mind is left perplexed and enfeebled, torn by a whirlwind that resembles madness in its passions and its symptoms; and thought is veiled from our understanding of the wisdom in the death of the righteous and the gentle in the prime of youth, while they tend the family's sacred temple — from a tender, sorrowing mother, to a faithful wife, to an innocent babe at the breast. Glory be to You, O my Lord.

Only yesterday you filled every eye, striving in the struggle of life; and scarcely had you attained your hopes when fate hurled at you the arrow of treachery and betrayal, and you fell slain, your heart slaughtered, your inmost soul wounded.

You were — and settled happiness hovered on its wings over the family's abode; but no interval of time had passed before happiness turned, faster than the twinkling of an eye, into abiding grief and enduring pain.