This is the version completed by Franz Xavier Suessmayr

This text, along with all the musical settings it inspired, speaks of terror, anguish, grief – but yet peace, hope and serenity in the face of our own mortality and our missing loved ones who have passed away from this transitory life.

We have each one of us to face this certainty and the end of the ego we have constructed around ourselves. What happens after death? Our Christian tradition can only describe it by analogy, image and metaphor. What is sure is that we will die as we have lived. I am convinced that there is much more than the truncated and simplified ideas expressed in the catechism.

As I see the flowers and lights on the graves in the local cemetery, I am reminded by the fact that civilisation is judged by the respect it pays to the departed.

Fidelium animae, per misericordiam Dei, requiescant in pace. Amen.