Cast upon me thy grief.
Give to me thy sorrow.
Yield to me thy pain.
Feed to me thy loss.
Give to me thy sorrow.
Yield to me thy pain.
Feed to me thy loss.
Dying men always ask the same question. It may take different forms, have different words. But the question is always the same. He had heard a dying man's question that night, and known it for what it was.
Now, hours later, he sat alone on the pier, watching the moon rise above gentle waves. Watching the stars reflect on the darkly mirrored surface of the harbor. And there, he remembered others. Dying men and women, with questions of their own.
One, dying the slow, strangling death of a man whose lungs had been crushed had asked for a promise that his family would know he died bravely. A woman wasting away of an illness that would have required a better healer than any then available to cure asked to hear one more time how her mother was doing. One, barely more than a boy, with the lower half of his body mangled beyond repair wanted one more story from the Captain who got him killed; a story of the Captain's sister, to replace the memories of a family that never wanted him.
And as he remembered each, he knew that their memory had been with him earlier, in the dingy, smoke-filled room. There, amidst the smell of cheap beer and stale men. He remembered holding them, standing near at the last, and telling each what they needed to hear, and vowing with each to make that answer true. Taking up one more burden for those brave, foolish souls that had followed him to their end. And he knew that they'd each been with him that night. Forced the truth from him in earnest, clear answers to a man he'd never trusted.
Because that man, too, was dying. Preparing to face an end he feared, and asking the same question as the rest. For though it had taken the form of a string of questions about the man who once led others, about his past, about his purpose, about what had made him who he was, he knew there was only one true question on the dying man's lips. The same one they had all been asking:
"When I am gone, what will happen to those I leave behind?"
And his answer, the same as ever it had been, was a clear and solemn promise.