The authorship of the poem was established a few years later after an investigation by journalist Abigail Van Buren. The soldier's father read the poem on BBC radio in 1995 in remembrance of his son, having been left it in an envelope addressed 'To all my loved ones' in his personal effects. The poem was introduced to many in Britain when it was read by the father of a soldier killed by a bomb in Northern Ireland. Her obituary in The Times made it clear that she was the author of the famous poem, which has been recited at funerals and on other appropriate occasions around the world for seventy years. She wrote other poems, but this, her first, endured. Because she never published or copyrighted it, there is no definitive version. Later she said that the words “just came to her” and expressed what she felt about life and death. Frye found herself composing a piece of verse on a brown paper shopping bag.
When her mother died, the heartbroken young woman told Frye that she never had the chance to “stand by my mother’s grave and shed a tear”. Margaret Schwarzkopf had been concerned about her mother, who was ill in Germany, but she had been warned not to return home because of increasing anti-Semitic unrest. She wrote it down on a brown paper shopping bag. She had never written any poetry, but the plight of a young German Jewish woman, Margaret Schwarzkopf, who was staying with her and her husband, inspired the poem. Mary Frye, who was living in Baltimore at the time, wrote the poem in 1932. Do not stand at my grave and cry, I am not there I did not die. When you awaken in the morning’s hush I am the swift uplifting rush Of quiet birds in circling flight.
I am a thousand winds that blow, I am the diamond glints on snow, I am the sun on ripened grain, I am the gentle autumn rain. The "definitive version," as published by The Times and The Sunday Times in Frye's obituary, 5 November 2004: Do not stand at my grave and weep, I am not there I do not sleep.
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