A great gift.

When I was in college I remember having a conversation about the death of my parents with an art teacher. The subject comes up with me more than one would think mainly because people will always ask why I have the name Cheung. I would have to explain that my father was Chinese. And usually people don't listen that carefully so they will ask what my dad does for a living. Then after all that they will ask what my mom does and then I would explain her death too.
And then there would be some discussion of when they died etc etc.
Anyway, this teacher talked about her mother's death when she was an adult and how it was never a good time to lose someone you love. And how she thought about it every day.

My mother has actually just died recently at that time and I tried to think about all that as little as possible. To think about all that would freeze me up and not that I didn't think about it, but I really just tried to ignore those thoughts.

I also remember a conversation with a family friend, a Chinese woman, who did not speak English, talking about when her mother died. She asked me if I thought of my mother often. I mentioned that I hadn't. At that point in life it was true. I guess more recently I have been thinking about my mother more often because of my kids or because I just visited her side of the family and also the thing Grace mentioned about Bunnies. (I had forgotten to mention that Jonah was also born in the year of the rabbit.)
But in any case, before my children, I didn't give much conscious thought to my mother. I bottled it up and kept moving forward forward forward.

So I was shocked when this family friend mention that she thought about her own mother every single day and felt the pain of her death as if it was yesterday. Honestly I had never heard much talk about emotions from Chinese people when I was growing up. Maybe it was because of my age, or because they thought that language was a barrier. But there it was. Here we were having this conversation at a restaurant at a table full of people.

I was thinking about this recently and how there is this sort of myth that if someone is old enough, that their death isn't sad. Maybe it's not tragic. It's not like a young persons death. But just because something isn't tragic doesn't mean that it isn't sad.

For instance imagine that you had a family friend who you hung out with as a child and let's say that this person was 1,000 years old. Now that is way older than humans are "supposed" to live. It would mean that this person could have raised you, your father, your grand father, and you're great grandfather as children.
 If this 1,000 year old person were to die, you wouldn't brush it off as "Oh yeah he/she had a good run anyway so it doesn't really matter, It was time to go."
The reason why you wouldn't do this even if you're own relatives might die as children or as young adults in war, from sickness, car accidents and various types of tragedies is because despite all that this almost immortal person would have become a pillar, a cornerstone for your family. And so their death may not be tragic, but it would still be a great loss.

But of course having the memory of such a person, 1,000 years or even a very young person and focusing on the life is a great gift. And thinking about them everyday in a positive way is a good thing. So recently I suppose I have been thinking of my mother everyday, because of the types of things I see Jonah do that remind me of her, because of the shape of my and Noah's feet, and of course because of that Spiritual Idea of the Bunnies that Grace pointed out.