The last thing he said to me before he died comes back to me every time soap bubbles are carried close to me on a breeze.  The small children in the waiting room were emptying the diaper bag and scattering toys across the floor.  A nurse gave them some bubbles and as I said goodbye to him a few bubbles floated in through the open doorway that he refused to allow closed.

Don't let my grandchildren grow up afraid of death, he said.  Don't let them live out their lives frightened of losing people or things.  The Depression broke us of that.  We learned the reality of impermanence.  It didn't make us detached; it made us better judges of our how we invested our lives.  It taught us what was truly important and what truly wasn't.

There is nothing in this world that is given to them that will not eventually be lost.  Do not let them grow up clinging in desperation to the belief that anything lasts forever.  Don't feed those fantasies.  Every living thing on this earth is here for only a time as every person they meet remains in their lives only for a time.  Every person they love will die… as they will die… and as we all end our time by dying.  Every thing they love can be lost or broken or stolen or given away.  Teach them that this is natural.  Teach them not be afraid of it. 

Don't make them wait until someone dies to start teaching them to deal with loss and grief.  Don't wait until they are adults.  Prepare them for a life lived bravely and intelligently.  Don't shield them from death or they will grow fearful and weak when they face it.  How they face it and how they survive it depends on what you teach them now.  Prepare them and you will go to your death some day knowing that it will not cripple them.  Let them celebrate my death day after I'm gone as they celebrated my birth day while I was here.    

I promised him.  He died four days later and I gathered my children to me and told them that our family had a new holiday to celebrate; and so we did.  We celebrated his day, and Uncle Conrad's day, and Grandma Turley's day, and at every funeral thereafter, for friends or family or pets, my children and their children's children would stand at the grave side and blow bubbles into the air, to remind of us of his words and of his vision of continuing generations of his blood that would grow up undaunted and unbroken by his death or any other. 

I always thought the bubbles a fitting metaphor for his transitory message and when I see them I think of him and miss him still.  When I overheard my granddaughter's friends in slumber party confession speaking of what frightened them the most, I listened to one girl say that she was terrified of losing her family.  My granddaughter's voice followed after, with her great-grandfather's words carried upon it, and they floated along in the space between me and her and the memory of him like bubbles being blown across time.

© 2010, ACG