I’ve often felt that, about both my parents. “Pop would have loved this” often comes to mind, even though in a few days (April 8) he will have been dead for 34 years — that’s two years longer than I knew him alive. I can still hear his voice as clearly as I would if he were in the room right now. Mom’s too.

Yet I had a remarkable experience not long after Mom died. I was driving somewhere and thinking of an experience I would like to have shared with Mom. I clearly heard her voice saying something to this effect: “One grace of death is that it forces you to give your love to the living. I gave my love to you. Now you have to give it to your wife, your children, your friends. Love is from the living and the dead, but it can only be given to the living. Life is love, and love goes on.” Ever since then I’ve found it easier to think about her, and about Pop and dozens of others I knew and loved in the generations ahead of me, nearly all of whom (but not all!) are now gone.

I grew up in Detroit, but we definitely had our own version of Da Shaw: the western shore of Cape Breton Island, Nova Scotia. We’d make the 1200 mile trip each summer, getting farmed out in my home town to the many aunts and uncles who’d stayed there.

Some months after he died (at 96), I found myself once again feeling very sad. I tried asking myself why that was, and suddenly the answer came: “He would have hated to miss this.”

I don’t remember what “this” was, and it doesn’t matter — what the thought made clear was what *I* was missing: his pleasure in the moment, his curiosity, his self-acceptance. And any time I think about those things, it brings him back in the best of ways.

We did indeed have a very special childhood, impossible to replicate today. While the poorest of children today have much more in the way of prepared entertainment and possessions, we had a richer life by far, especially in the summer. Our lives were made of leaky boats, leaky cottages with no electricity, outhouses, solar showers, bare feet, bikes with one pedal and one tire that would stay inflated, shorts (shirt optional), Army surplus life preservers left over from the war, pocket knives, fishing poles with linen line, dip nets, unreliable automobiles, a crank-up Victrola (look it up), a radio that got maybe the two strongest signals from Manhattan, straw hats for the sun, blueberries, blue claw crabs, clams, striped bass, flounder, watermelon and cantaloupe, sweet corn, the ice-man that cameth, also the milk man and the bread man, vegetable gardens, chickens, the beach, and occasionally the Point Pleasant boardwalk which was the event of the month.

As Dave points out, it was our parents, grandparents, aunts and uncles who made that environment possible, starting with our grandfather George W. Searls building “The Shack” assisted by Dave’s dad. Grandpa Searls had, unfortunately for us as well as him, passed away before our time. So the adults around which our lives revolved were my parents, Grace and Arch Apgar; Dave’s parents, Eleanor and Allen Searls; and our aunt and grandmother who were both named Ethel Searls. All wonderful people, of whom only my mom remains with us, and looking forward to her 101st on June 24th.

If there is Life Everlasting, I’m sure where part of mine will be, and who will be there.