Regardless of how well you know your family or how much time you spend together, part of you wonders what life would be like if your relatives lived forever. How would this reframe your joys, sorrows and burdens? Would you reunite someday?
I went to highschool with a girl who had three adorable toddlers when she suddenly died of complications from breast cancer. She was only thirty-one. Her spirit remains in the hearts of people who knew her. Echoes of her laughter live on. Her children now adamantly believe they contact her, and do.
A friend of mine looked after his great-aunt until she died at one hundred and two. He tended to her house and garden, visited her regularly and assisted when she voluntarily went into a nursing home. While she was there, he arranged to have her bills paid, and organized her life the best he could. She lived in aged care less than two years before she left this world. Then, her nephew managed the probate, taxes and more. She rests in view of a bay, gladly reunited with her husband.
I know a man who did not get along with his father in life. Despite this, he keeps the deceased father's ashes in a soup tureen under his bed. The living man says he does not believe in ghosts and talk of an afterlife makes him edgy. Still, he cannot bring himself to release memories of life with this man.
As it happens, I have visited quite a few cemeteries. It may surprise you to discover what happens to plots and crypts that are rented by the year and at times, forgotten. When a family dies off or becomes disinterested, cemeteries re-sell plots. Imagine you may have unexpected company oneday.
As our parents get older, their health issues arise to remind us of fallibility and mortality of being human. Our physical abilities change. Our faculties sharpen or weaken. Parents do not expect to outlive their children. Yet, some do. Children do not always find it convenient or desirable to stop their lives, give up independence and devote themselves to parent care. Other children do not think twice about reorganzing their lives or relocating to do the best they can to help when needed. You do what makes sense to you and make your own choices.
How many people do you know who have moved back in with parents or parents have moved back in with them? I know some adult children who have never left home. They are into their forties. Their lives revolve around parents they feel need them.
If your relatives lived forever in the physical world, that is, the ones you like and the one you do not, they would each continue to teach you things. Your responsibilities would expand, but of course, that would not imply you would accept them. You can choose to believe in reincarnation, immortality or none of the above, but the connections you forge with people live forever in your heart. Love is everlasting.