Death shall be no more

From "Everything sad coming untrue":

“Gandalf! I thought you were dead! But then I thought I was dead myself.
Is everything sad going to come untrue? What’s happened to the world?”

I was choking back tears as I read this line to my children the other day. Sam wakes up after his ordeal with Frodo and the ring. He thought he was dying after he completed the mission he was sent on. Their ordeal to that point had been a suicide mission to save the world. When he awoke to find Gandalf, who he thought was dead, at the foot of his bed, he was incredulous. That line, “Is everything sad going to come untrue?” gets me. To know that the war is over and the dead are alive. To know that everything is different now. ....

“He will wipe away every tear from their eyes, and death shall be no more,

neither shall there be mourning, nor crying, nor pain anymore,

for the former things have passed away” (Rev 21:4).

Jacob Crouch, "Every thing sad coming untrue," Aliens and Pilgrims, 2026.