Twenty one poems

Another account that stays with me was told in a letter and involves a couple whose son Brad died when he was twenty-one. Brad liked to write poems, the best of which was about the sorrow that resulted from killing a dragonfly. The poem was read at his funeral. Afterward, a neighbor who had herself lost a child gave the family a pamphlet, БЂњWater Bugs and Dragonflies (How to Explain Death to Children).БЂ«The story was beautiful, the mother wrote to me. It told of water bugs crawling along the bottom of a dark, muddy pond. Every now and then, one of them climbed the stem of a lily pad and disappeared. They eventually made a pact that the next water bug to disappear would come back and tell the others where it had gone. One day a bug crawled up, reached the pad, shed its ugly shell, sprouted wings, and became a beautiful dragonfly. It soared off, delighting in the sunБЂ™s warmth and freedom. Remembering its promise, it tried repeatedly to dive into the water, but its wings wouldnБЂ™t allow it to go through. The obvious moral is that our loved ones assume new forms and so cannot come back to tell us where they have gone after death ...»