Auntie Beth died suddenly. Coronary thrombosis gives no warning. Driving to the funeral home, people on the sidewalks and in cars were happy, laughing, and enjoying life. “Don’t you know what a sad day this is?” I wanted to scream. “Can’t you see my grief?”

Any attempt to find words to express feelings related to the sudden loss of a loved one is futile since there are no words that can handle this moment in anyone’s life.

In the film Four Weddings and a Funeral, Matthew (John Hannah) and his partner Gareth (Simon Callow) are enjoying a festive wedding reception when Gareth suffers a heart attack and dies.

At the funeral, Matthew’s eulogy to Gareth is heart-wrenching. I began this post saying there are no words to express the sadness of sudden loss; but, W. H. Auden proves me wrong. Through Matthew, Auden captures the feelings of devastating loss in his poem, “Funeral Blues.”

With Gareth’s death, Matthew’s joy and his reason for living are gone. His loss is both public and private. He feels the world should acknowledge his pain and share his grief. “Let aeroplanes circle moaning overhead / Scribbling on the sky the message He Is Dead, / Put crêpe bows round the white necks of the public doves, / Let the traffic policemen wear black cotton gloves.” At the same time, Matthew’s loss is intensely personal. “He was my North, my South, my East and West, / My working week and my Sunday rest.”

No one but the bereaved can understand or feel the intensity of such sorrow, “For nothing now can ever come to any good.”

A life is without books is unimaginable. The worlds created by Dickens, Bronte, Austen, Steinbeck, Irving, and a host of other writers enrich my life.

Emily Dickinson expresses her reverence for books as “a bequest of wings.” In another poem, the book is a “Frigate” and “the Chariot / That bears the Human Soul!”

Dickinson regards a book’s words as precious, capable of loosening the human spirit and granting liberty of mind. Opening a book is freeing a genie from captivity. The loosened spirit is free to soar. Life is bigger, horizons are broader, possibilities endless, and liberty unlimited.

Like Dickinson, my favorite books are “kinsmen on the shelf.” The wall above my desk is lined with shelves holding the books I’ve acquired over a lifetime of reading. Looking at my bookshelf is like looking at a family photograph. Each book is a collection of memories. I recall when I bought the book, why I bought it, and where I was when I read it. If the book was a gift, I recall who gave it to me. Each book transports me back to the experience of reading. I am free to reconsider its content and meaning. I am inspired to build on what I learned. And, I am free to take the journey at any time.

How would Dickinson regard the effect of modern technology on the book? What would she say of ebooks and Kindle? While I love the feel a book in my hands, I am no Luddite. My Kindle is handy.

But, Kindle does not provide all the benefits of a printed book nor does it provide all the benefits of modern technology. For example, most Kindle books lack an index linked to the book’s content and, unlike electronic books owned by some libraries, it lacks the option of full-text searching.

Emily Dickinson might say it comes down to a question of access. A book, whether printed or electronic, is “a bequest of wings.”

I was in the seventh grade. Priscilla Zwitzer, who taught at my school, was a friend of my family’s and a neighbor. Priscilla and her husband had an exquisite collection of classical music and spoken word LP recordings.

Priscilla and Martin had no children. Educated, well-traveled, and sophisticated, they were the parents I thought I should have been given. They let me have unsupervised access to their LP collection. I enjoyed countless hours of listening to classical music performances and poetry read by actors who created magic with their voices.

James Mason’s “Annabel Lee” was dark, morose, and appealed to my moody adolescent sensibilities. The tone and rhythm of the poem and the images of “high-born kinsmen” and “sepulchres” by the sea captured my imagination. “What’s a sepulcher?” I asked Priscilla. She smiled as she handed me a dictionary.

My seventh grade drama class introduced me to Poe’s short stories. We were given literary passages to prepare as dramatic readings. When I was handed the opening paragraph of “The Fall of the House of Usher,” I could not have been more pleased. My hours of practicing to sound like James Mason paid off despite the effect of puberty on the male voice. “That was very well done,” said Mr. Edwards, my drama teacher. “Dennis has set the performance standard,” he announced to the class.

It was many and many a year ago in a place beside a phonograph where I lived with no other thought than to be transported worlds away by the delights of poetry.

From the seventh grade to today, poetry has given me great joy and pleasure. Priscilla and Martin passed on years ago leaving me with the legacy of an incomparable gift.