Grazing the Dead - Part II

copyright 2005 by Blake Lamar

“Your father would never take you to the river,” his mother had told him that morning. “He’d be sitting here watching the early news or reading the paper and yelling at you not to bug him anymore about it. It took me a long time to see it, but it’s a good thing he left before you could get to know him too well. This way you’re nothing like him. You’re just like your Grandpa, instead. A little too quiet, but it’s not such a bad thing to keep your mouth shut. Keeps you outta trouble.”

“But I didn’t want him to go,” Benjamin said, leaving his breakfast untouched before him on the kitchen table. “Couldn’t he have waited a little longer. At least long enough to teach me how to drive.”

“I’m sure he wanted to wait. I’m sure he would have liked to see you all the way through college and see his great grandkids, but when God wants to you come home and be with Him, you can’t say no. You don’t want to say no, really. There’s some great things here on this Earth and it’s hard to leave your family behind, but Heaven is so much better. And I’m sure he was looking forward to seeing Grandma Elsie again. I think if he didn’t have you in his life, he woulda died of a broken heart six years ago.”

“You can really die from that?”

“In a way. When your heart gets broken like that, you just kind of stop caring about living and stop doing all those little things we do to keep ourselves alive. You stop eating right. Maybe you don’t take your blood pressure medication. You sit in the house until your muscles start to atrophy. Things like that. But Grandpa still had you to look forward to. You filled that empty space left when Grandma died. You kept his heart from breaking.”

“But Grandpa’s heart did break,” Benjamin said. “It was attacked.”

“But that’s a different kind of broken heart,” his mother said. “Grandpa had a hard life. He had to work hard everyday just to have food to eat and someplace to stay. His family lost the farm in the depression and there just wasn’t much a man could do with a third-grade education. He made it through when a lot of people didn’t, but those kinds of things catch up to you when you get old. Every time he came home tired and worn out from picking cotton all day or plowing for some farmer, it was just building up to last Wednesday. Then when he was climbing up that ladder to adjust the antenna because the TV was all fuzzy, his heart finally gave out with that last bit of effort.”

“He was gonna miss the weather,” Benjamin said. “He thought it might rain.”

“Everybody’s been hoping for it.”

“But it didn’t.”

“No, it didn’t.”

“Why couldn’t he have that last wish,” Benjamin said. “To feel the rain one more time. He always smiled when it rained. Even though he didn’t have a farm or crops anymore. It made him feel good to know other peoples’ crops were getting the water they needed.”

“He can feel the rain now everyday if he wants to. No one knows exactly what Heaven is like, but I think it’s going to be every good feeling you ever had plus all those you didn’t, wrapped into one multiplied by a billion.”