I don’t know who might be needing to read this, but I have been feeling strongly that I needed to write this down today. I have one memory of my Grandfather Jeppson, who died a young grandfather from the effects of the rheumatic fever he’d had years earlier. It was from the last time I saw him, at three and a half: of sitting cuddled up in his lap, with him rocking me in a rocking chair on a wooden-planked floor. When I was little, I frequently had that image come to mind, and it was as if I were wrapped in his strong arms again. I was deeply loved. It comforted me greatly. As I grew into a teenager, the image came far less often, and I decided there was no way to tell if it had been a real memory or a three-year-old’s remembered dream, given that at the age I’d first experienced it, it would have been hard to tell the difference–and I pretty much dismissed it.
It wasn’t till I got quite a bit older that I realized that it didn’t matter which it was; that it had been a comfort and a feeling of the presence of my grandfather whenever I’d needed it as a child. With that, the memory of remembering it became a comfort to me again, now that I am someone facing what he faced way back then: the knowledge of a damaged body that is not likely to see my grandchildren’s children grow old.
In this life or the next, I do believe we look after our loved ones the best we know how.