Living with Pat Sands' death

As I think back 30 years to the sudden death of Pat Sands I realize what a struggle it was to face death. I realize that was the first time I had TRULY faced it and, if Dylan Thomas is correct, the one TRUE time. There were so many things to learn and face. While I was ready to keep Pat alive in my memory I was not ready for how much of me died with him. Things like that. Here is a poem that Pat discussed with Milt not long before he died.

A refusal to Mourn the Death, by Fire, of a Child in London
By Dylan Thomas

Never until the mankind making
Bird beast and flower
Fathering and all humbling darkness
Tells with silence the last light breaking
And the still hour
Is come of the sea tumbling in harness

And I must enter again the round
Zion of the water bead
And the synagogue of the ear of corn
Shall I let pray the shadow of a sound
Or sow my salt seed
In the least valley of sackcloth to mourn

The majesty and burning of the child's death.
I shall not murder
The mankind of her going with a grave truth
Nor blaspheme down the stations of the breath
With any further Elegy of innocence and youth.

Deep with the first dead lies London's daughter,
Robed in the long friends,
The grains beyond age, the dark veins of her mother,
Secret by the unmourning water
Of the riding Thames.
After the first death, there is no other.