Death makes angels of us all & gives us wings where we had shoulders smooth as raven's claws ...

The dead are always sacrosanct, whereas the living will always have scorn heaped upon them. Sometimes, one can surmise the best way to be appreciated by those whom we love is to remove ourselves from them; in a sense to underline and put an exclamation point to everything we've ever done, to force them to look back upon the past to remember and cherish that which they took for granted while it still drew a breath.

Jerry's Father & the 4 Noble Truths

Ongoing periods of silence from my own father, whom I will grant I have given reason to be distant from me, inspires me to be calling my own son almost everyday lately. It's not easy to hear from his mother stories of him acting up, acting like I do from time to time, full of self-pity and desperation. I know it's not easy for him, the oldest child among a brood of kids from two different sets of parents. He is facing the onset of puberty and adulthood, and this is not an easy time for him. He is short among his peers, and I know he gets teased about it.

He has said lately, "Life Sucks," and of course I have used this observation of his to remind him what I have explained to him before, the first noble truth of the Buddha: All Life is Sorrowful. It's funny, I remember him one day anguishing before me to tell me something hard to tell, because I had been talking to him about the Buddhist point of view, and he needed to tell me that he goes to church with his mother and they are Christian, and he thought I would be upset that he was a Christian. He was so relieved when I wasn't upset. I told him Buddhism in many ways has no problem with Christianity, they way Christians might have a problem with Buddhism.