The Secret of Death

Gibran died in New York City on April 10th, 1931, at the age of forty-eight. His body was embalmed and buried in the Mount Benedict Cemetery of Our Lady of the Cedars of Lebanon, Boston’s first Maronite church. On the morning of July 23rd, 1931, a funeral procession accompanied Marianna Gibran to the port of Providence, where the coffin containing Gibran’s body was embarked on a ship for Lebanon, his native land. On August 21st it was received by his countrymen in Beirut, who took it by foot to the site chosen for Gibran’s final resting place: the former Carmelite monastery of Mar Sarkis in his hometown of Bsharri. Gibran wrote in The Prophet: “For what is it to die but to stand naked in the wind and to melt into the sun?”