The part that will always stay with me was Mark’s sister Sarah bravely and brilliantly reading an amazing poem that seemed to sum up precisely why aviators fly. I have tried a few times to find a copy of it.
I’m not sure if this is the same poem, but (lifted from PPRuNe) here is what Sarah read at Ray’s Service of Thanksgiving in 2006. Even if it’s not the same, I hope folks will find it appropriate here:
The Airman’s World
by Gill Robb-Wilson
read by Sarah Hanna
YOU’VE been cruising the brooding hills under
heavy skies – maybe a little lonely and a
bit uncertain – when suddenly the westerning sun
finds a slit in the canopy overhead.
.
Long after you’ve forgotten the sweat of the journey
you’ll remember the glimpse of that sunkissed
valley with the fingers of the hills all pointing
to it as though fearful that you might
miss its loveliness.
.
When you’ve flown enough years to have
crossed many hills and valleys, and known much
loneliness and endured many uncertainties – why then
you’re a pilot, and on the walls of your memory
are hung such frescoes as no other breed of
man has ever seen. And because of them you can
never grow too old and you can never be too
much afraid of what lies ahead.
.
Just as the fact of flight telescopes time and space,
so the experience of flying telescopes the
pattern of life itself for the airman.
.
If you don’t venture on sullen skies, you never
come to sunkissed valleys. If you palms have never
been moist, your heart has never thrilled. If you
have never been afraid, you have never been courageous.
.
You have learned that if skies were always
cloudless, the hills and valleys beneath would be
barren. You have seen primordial forces at
work beyond the control of any man, but you have
fashioned a skill to live with them
in security and peace. You have sensed that where
there is no challenge there is no achievement.
.
So I think he learns of life, this one with the seven
league boots, this airman who goes from
place to place with such swiftness that even the
moods of the sky itself are
all caught up in his going and coming.
.
And if it does not mould him in humility of mind
And in peace of heart – and if he does not
become in spirit at one with the fingered hills
pointing eternally to some bright human hope which
nestles in the shadows of the sullen
history – then I have not read with understanding
for most of a lifetime the long, long thoughts
of my confrères – they who have earned a
citizenship in the airman’s world.
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