Requiem for a Gentle Soul
Some souls touch our lives only briefly, yet leave behind something quiet and unmistakable. A few words for Mark, a gentle soul whose path crossed mine for a little while—and whose passing deserves a moment of tenderness, remembrance, and peace.
For Mark.
Some people enter our lives quietly.
We may never know exactly how they arrived, or why our paths crossed. We may know only fragments of their story, glimpses of the road they traveled, and something of the heart that traveled it.
And yet, sometimes, that is enough.
There was a gentleness in Mark that I felt across the distance. Something tender. Something that seemed to have known much of life and yet had not entirely closed itself against it.
I did not know him well. But perhaps we do not always need to know someone well to recognize something in them.
A soul can touch us without explanation.
And now Mark has gone where all of us will one day go—beyond the reach of our questions, beyond the stories we tell about a life, beyond the names we give to suffering and healing, arriving perhaps in that great silence from which we came.
So I will not try to explain his life.
I will simply honor it.
May everything that was heavy be laid down.
May everything that hurt be released.
May everything that was unfinished find its completion in a place beyond our understanding.
And may the gentleness I sensed in him return now to the great gentleness from which all things arise.
Rest well, Mark.
You were here.
You were seen.
And for a little while, our paths crossed.
That is enough.
Godspeed, gentle soul.
Nigel teaandzen.org
