My mother died in 2004 and my father passed away in 2007. 
It was not sudden or tragic but the end of a long life for each of them.  Dad had been sick for several years and my mother had died from Parkinson’s three years before so it was not unexpected.  Friends had told me that each of the children would grieve in particular ways and there was nothing that could predict how that grief would affect us.  There are undoubtedly some principles of grief and some common patterns we can read about in books but our friends were right.  Each of the three children had their own relationship with our parents and have settled their accounts uniquely.
It’s not the anniversary of  Dad’s death or Mom’s but what started me thinking about it was this portion of the poem “In Blackwater Woods” by Mary Oliver I read this morning.  A good friend posted it on Facebook and it caught me by surprise.
 
Every year
everything
I have ever learned
in my lifetime
leads back to this: the fires
and the black river of loss
whose other side
is salvation,
whose meaning
none of us will ever know.
To live in this world
you must be able
to do three things:
to love what is mortal;
to hold it
against your bones knowing
your own life depends on it;
and when the time comes to let it go,
to let it go.
 
Sometimes we let go and those people we loved and who loved us come back to us as if they would not let go.  There is something they left unfinished in us and over the years they are still working to complete it.  It’s not like being haunted.  It’s not hearing dead voices in the night.  It is the sense that the best of who they were (and often the part we did not know) is being lived out for them in us.  In life we carry their dreams oftentimes as a burden.  When they are gone and we let go of who we thought they were they come more fully alive through us. 
I have told men who have lost their fathers that they will be sitting alone three or four years afterwards and suddenly discover traits of their fathers they thought were his alone coming to life in them.  It’s more than memories.  It is a kind of waking up.  I know Mary Oliver is right about “when the time comes to let it go” to let it go and I also know there is a sense of being part of a story that continues and grows with each generation.