Death is nothing at all. It does not count.
I have only slipped away into the next room.
Nothing has happened. Everything remains exactly as it was.
I am I, and you are you,
and the old life that we lived so fondly together is untouched, unchanged.
Whatever we were to each other, that we are still.
Call me by the old familiar name.
Speak of me in the easy way which you always used.
Put no difference into your tone.
Wear no forced air of solemnity or sorrow.
Laugh as we always laughed at the little jokes that we enjoyed together.
Play, smile, think of me, pray for me.
Let my name be ever the household word that it always was.
Let it be spoken without an effort, without the ghost of a shadow upon it.
Life means all that it ever meant. It is the same as it ever was.
There is absolute and unbroken continuity.
What is this death but a negligible accident?
Why should I be out of mind because I am out of sight?
I am but waiting for you, for an interval,
somewhere very near, just round the corner.
All is well. Nothing is hurt; nothing is lost.
One brief moment and all will be as it was before.
How we shall laugh at the trouble of parting when we meet again!
The history of this prayer
The passage that circulates as “Death is nothing at all” is often credited to Saint Augustine, especially in Portuguese, Italian and Spanish, but it is not his. It comes from a sermon by the English Anglican canon Henry Scott Holland (1847-1918), preached in St Paul’s Cathedral, London, on Whit Sunday, 15 May 1910. King Edward VII had died on 6 May, and his body was to lie in state in Westminster Hall from 17 to 19 May. The sermon is called “The King of Terrors”, a phrase from the Book of Job, and its text is 1 John 3:2: “Beloved, now are we the sons of God, and it doth not yet appear what we shall be.”
What the sermon actually says
Holland begins by saying that all of us hover between two ways of regarding death. The first is the instinctive recoil from it as the supreme and irrevocable disaster, and he notes that Scripture itself gives voice to that cry. The second is what we feel looking down at the quiet face of someone we have loved: this is where the words “Death is nothing at all…” come in. In the sermon they are what that face seems to say to us in its silence.
Holland then admits that we cannot keep that mood: the “long, horrible silence” of absence follows, and the old terror comes back. His conclusion is that “our task is to deny neither judgement, but to combine both”, and the way to do so is faith: we are already sons of God, and we shall grow until we see Christ as he is. Read on its own, the famous passage says less than Holland meant.
And Saint Augustine?
No one knows when or by whom Augustine’s name was attached to the text; nothing like it appears in his works. Interestingly, the passage contains a very Catholic line: the one who has died asks, “pray for me”.
When Augustine’s mother, Saint Monica, died at Ostia in 387, he did not say that death was nothing. In the Confessions (IX, 12) he tells how he first held back his tears and asked himself what hurt so much within him, “if not the fresh wound of our sweet and dear habit of living together, suddenly torn apart”. Later, alone before God, he let them flow: “I let go the tears I had been holding back, to flow as much as they would, and made of them a bed for my heart; and it rested in them.” And Monica, shortly before she died, had asked her sons for one thing only: “that you remember me at the altar of the Lord, wherever you may be” (IX, 11).
For Augustine, the death of someone we love truly hurts, and the Christian answer is to weep before God, to hope in the resurrection and to pray for the dead, above all at Mass.
