When Tomorrow Starts Without Me: Meaning, Author, and How to Use It

When Tomorrow Starts Without Me is one of the most shared poems of comfort on the internet, read at funerals and printed on memorial cards across the English-speaking world — usually with no author’s name attached, and often with the wrong one. The poem is in fact under copyright: it was written by David Romano in 1993, and it has been copied without his name so many times that the confusion has become part of its story. Out of respect for the author we do not reproduce the full text here, and we don’t offer a printable version — most “free PDF” copies you’ll find online are unauthorized. What this page offers instead: what the poem actually says, the authorship story, guidance on using it at a service, and public-domain poems with the same message that you can print freely.

What the poem is about

The premise is simple and quietly devastating: the speaker imagines the first morning after their own death. The sun rises, the day begins, and the people they love wake up to a world that no longer includes them. The opening couplet — “When tomorrow starts without me / and I’m not here to see” — sets the whole poem in that imagined tomorrow, and everything that follows is the speaker’s answer to the grief they picture on their loved ones’ faces.

It is the same device that makes Do Not Stand at My Grave and Weep so beloved: the person who has died speaks directly to the mourners. But where Frye’s poem disperses the departed into wind and birdsong, Romano’s takes them somewhere specific — through the gates of heaven — and sends back a report that everything is well.

Who really wrote it? The David Romano story

David Romano wrote When Tomorrow Starts Without Me in 1993, reportedly for a friend who was dying. Within a few years it was circulating by email forward and message board, and somewhere along the way his name fell off it. It has since been printed as “author unknown,” credited to “Anonymous,” and — bizarrely — attributed to writers who had nothing to do with it, including at various times David M. Romano rendered as other Davids entirely, and even horror novelist David Morrell, whose name a careless forwarder apparently confused with Romano’s. Funeral homes, memorial sites, and sympathy-card printers have repeated these errors for decades.

The confusion is a familiar pattern with funeral verse. A poem that consoles people spreads faster than its byline, and once a text has been photocopied into a thousand orders of service, the record is hard to repair — the authorship of the most famous funeral poem of all was disputed for sixty years for exactly this reason. The difference here is that Romano is a modern author whose poem is still under copyright, which is why this page summarizes and quotes sparingly rather than reprinting. If a website offers you the “full text” or a “free printable PDF,” it almost certainly did not ask him first.

The poem’s journey, verse by verse

Rather than reproduce the text, here is the emotional arc the poem travels — enough to know whether it’s right for your service.

The imagined morning. The poem opens on the first day the speaker will not see: sunrise, waking loved ones, eyes full of tears. The speaker’s immediate instinct is not sorrow for themselves but concern for the people crying — they wish, at once, that no one would weep the way they are weeping.

A plea against grief. The speaker asks the mourners not to cry the way they did that morning, reminding them of everything the two of them shared — the love, the laughter, the days that made a life together. The argument is gentle: so much was given and received that tears cannot be the right summary of it.

The angel and the departure. The poem then turns to narrative. An angel arrives, calls the speaker by name, and leads them away. The speaker describes leaving — and admits a backward glance: a moment of hesitation at leaving everything and everyone they love. It is this admission that keeps the poem honest; the departed is not serenely indifferent, but torn, and chooses to trust where they are going.

Through heaven’s gates. The angel brings the speaker to heaven, where they are welcomed — and the welcome is the poem’s theological heart. What counts, the speaker learns, is not wealth or achievement but the love shown in a life; kindness is the currency at the gate. It is a folk theology of comfort, not doctrine, which is partly why the poem crosses denominational lines so easily.

The promise of reunion. The closing movement is spoken back over the shoulder to the mourners: the separation is temporary, the distance is smaller than it feels, and whenever the living think of the one they lost, the speaker is — in the poem’s closing image — right there in their heart. Tomorrow starts without them, but it does not start apart from them.

When to use it at a funeral

Because the speaker is the person who has died, the poem fits any relationship without alteration — parent, grandparent, sibling, partner, friend. Its explicit imagery of heaven, angels, and God makes it best suited to Christian and broadly religious services; for a secular ceremony, Do Not Stand at My Grave and Weep or the readings on our funeral readings page will sit more comfortably. It is a popular choice when the death was sudden or premature — the poem’s backward glance and its insistence that the departed is safe answer exactly the questions that haunt those left behind. It works well read by a family member mid-service, or by the celebrant on the family’s behalf.

How to read it aloud

This is a longer poem than most funeral verse — several stanzas of rhymed couplets — so pace matters more than anything. Read slowly, and resist the sing-song pull of the rhyme: let punctuation, not line endings, tell you where to pause, or the rhythm will start to gallop. The narrative middle (the angel, the gates) can be read a little more plainly, like telling a story; save your weight for the opening morning scene and the final promise of reunion, which deserve a real pause before them. If the poem feels too long for your service, it is common and perfectly acceptable to read the opening and closing stanzas only — tell the celebrant which stanzas you’re using so the order of service matches.

Public-domain alternatives you can print freely

If you want the same message — the departed speaking comfort back to the living — in a poem you can legally print in an order of service or memorial card, these public-domain pieces carry it beautifully. Tennyson’s Crossing the Bar, which he asked to be placed at the end of every edition of his poems, imagines death as a calm evening voyage out to sea, with a meeting — not an ending — on the far side:

Christina Rossetti’s Remember makes the same turn Romano’s poem makes — the dying speaker releasing the living from grief — and ends with one of the most generous permissions in English poetry: better to forget and smile than to remember and be sad.

And this short traditional verse, long used on memorial cards precisely because it asks the mourner — as Romano’s poem does — to let love, not grief, have the last word:

For more poems in this spirit, browse our full collection of funeral poems, or see Death Is Nothing at All — a public-domain reading with the same “I have only slipped away” consolation — and She Is Gone, the poem famously read at the Queen Mother’s funeral.