My parents are both in their early 90s. They're still alive,
Last edited Thu Sep 28, 2017, 03:10 PM - Edit history (1)
although they're in various stages of poor health these days. Recently, I visited them for a week and, as usual, we had a lot of conversations about a lot of things.
Those conversations are generally about things from our shared past, as you might expect. Occasionally, they drift into talking about the future, which my parents fully realize is fairly short for them. They're both non-believers, but probably wouldn't call themselves atheists. They just don't believe in any deities. Such things have never made any sense to them, as they have thought about it. My father, during this visit, mentioned that he's unconcerned about dying, but hopes it's not a long, drawn-out process, full of pain. He talked about people remembering him for a couple of generations or so, in one way or another, and said that he hoped everyone remembered him fondly and without any animus toward him. My mother, gentle, wise soul that she is, doesn't reflect much on such things, but she was nodding, as she does, when my father was talking about such things.
I took some time to explain how grateful I was to have been raised by them, and having learned how to look at the world, how to consider and analyze things, and how to treat others, based on their models and teaching. My earliest memory comes from age 4, and involves an elderly woman who lived next door to my family's home at the time. She was a very nice woman who made cookies and always had one to offer a toddler. The memory I recall as my earliest was something that happened in her living room.
It was around Christmas time and she had a little decorated tree on her mantel, surrounded by tiny gifts wrapped in colorful paper and delicately beribboned in contrasting colors. As I remember very clearly, I asked her what was in those gift boxes, since I was old enough to anticipate gifts for that holiday. That old neighbor woman laughed and said, "Why, nothing, Dickie. They're just for decoration."
I remember being puzzled at this. Why, I wondered, would someone wrap an empty gift? Was it some sort of trick? An empty box with a pretty wrapping seemed illogical to me at age 4. And that's the end of the memory. I suppose I learned from this that appearances do not always indicate the contents of things. Perhaps it was the beginning of my lifelong dedication to examining the things around me to try to learn what they really were and of what they were composed.
I was raised by kind, thoughtful, logical parents. They helped me learn how to look at the world. Others, like my kindly old neighbor, taught me other lessons. I learned to see other people of all ages as quite the same as I was myself. My mother helped me understand that things that hurt me or made me sad made other people feel the same, and that I should avoid harming others by considering how I would feel if I were the other person. She taught that lesson to me again and again.
No religion was required for me to understand that basic rule of human interaction. It always seemed to work that if I considered my planned actions with reference to myself and how I might react if someone else acted as I was thinking of acting, I would generally do the right thing. And so it is, apparently. And so it is.
My parents will soon be gone. Too soon. They'll live on in my mind and in the minds of all who knew them for a time, but eventually everyone who knew them, and that's three more generations now, will be gone, too. My parents believe that is enough. I believe that is enough. I'm good with that. I hope I have as long a run as my parents. That would be nice. If not, though, I'm OK with that as well.
It's enough. It is what it is. It's my life and it is, and has been, what I have made it to be through the choices I have made with the circumstances I have encountered. It is enough.
No deities required, nor needed.
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