The Pot of Basil by Bernard Capes — Read

It is a pathetic paradox that we never truly acquire anything until we have lost it. To possess rightly what is ours we must be deprived of it, must come to view it down the perspectives of the past and gone, to enable us to get its real proportions into focus. That would seem to imply that, as the mystics teach us, matter is the illusion and imagination the reality, since loss opens our mental vision to a thousand truths, to which while possessing them we were blind. The miser, robbed and pauperised, realises too late the countless opportunities for happiness he has forgone; the desolated lover knows at last the devotion which risked death to pleasure him, rather than deny to the lesser faith that proof which, to its own, more strong and pure, was inessential. So it often is that to die is to live for the first time as one's true self, even in the hearts of those who cherished us.

Ah, death, who clears the vision; in whom all revealed truths corradiate -- give us back the child, the friend, the lover, whose worth we never really estimated until you opened our eyes to all that it had meant to us. The qualities we were impatient of because we could not understand; the motives we misinterpreted; even the small vitalities that often worried us, got in our way, seemed importunate and tiresome -- what would we not give at last to hear again one tone of the insistent voice, to feel again one touch of the restless hands, whose very tyranny expressed a fearless confidence in the love that would not see. But it may not be; our knowledge comes in loss; and were these to be restored to us, the veil of flesh would again close in and blind our vision to their truth.