For Charles Darwin, who sat with his 10 year old daughter Annie in the days before her death after a long period of illness in 185l, an event which, painfully, cemented his views on the cruel struggle for existence underlying all life and all beauty. Annie's death caused Darwin also to lose any conventional form of faith, though his wife Emma never lost hers. He never lost his sense of joy and awe.

Darwin wrote in his notebooks about “the dreadful and quiet war in the peaceful woods and smiling fields”.  His sister-in-law, Fanny Wedgewood, was with him on the day of Annie's death and wrote "The sky a livid iron-grey and overcast. At twelve o'clock came a peal of thunder and we heard her breath her last"

This is my first reply to a long distance co-write idea sent through by the lovely Nova Scotian songsmith Dave Gunning. And even if it evolves into something else across the Atlantic (as would befit it!), I think this first answer has something in it.

WE'RE ALL LEAVING
 
There is thunder on the skyline
And it tears her breath away
Like the twilight takes the day
 
A father’s kind hand could not command her
To return to him once more
Like a soldier from the war
 
CHORUS
We’re all leaving
Even the ones who stay behind
We’re all leaving in our own time
We’re all leaving in our own time
 
Each night surrenders to a morning
And beneath the April sky
He can hear a quiet cry
 
On smiling fields there's a battle raging
And for every bloom he knows
Another flower never grows
 
We're all leaving ...

BRIDGE
And he has no Ark to bear him from this Flood
Just a broken vessel wrought in flesh and blood
And though riptides pull him under
He will not cease to wonder
At the beauty of it all, at the beauty of it all
 
He brings her mother to the church door
And while she prays for what will come
He walks those woods alone
 
And there he builds his own cathedrals
While on every whirring wing
He hears the whole world sing
 
copyright Karine Polwart / Dave Gunning 2009