"All saints' Day - Kära farmor" by Capelson, on Flickr

"They live on, those giants of our childhood. They manage to even take death in their stride. Death may take them, but it can never take our relationship with them. However else they still live on, they still live on in us. Memory is more than looking back to a time gone by; it is looking into another kind of time altogether. A time where everything that was continues to be – and grows and changes with the life that is in us.

The people we loved and who loved us; for good or for ill, taught us things. Dead though they may be, as we come to understand them in new ways, it is though they come to understand us – and we come to understand ourselves – in new ways too.

Who knows what 'the communion of saints' means, but surely it means that these people we once knew are not just voices that have ceased to speak. They are saints because though them the power and richness of life not only touched us once, but continues to touch us still.

They have their business to get on with – moving 'from strength to strength' – whatever that means. We might imagine ourselves on a fading shore as they move on to whatever shore may await them. But they carry with them something of us, as we do of them. And so, to think of them is not only to remember how they used to be. It is, in some way, to see and hear them as they now are.

If they had things to say to us then, they have things to say to us now – as we have to them. And the things now spoken may not be what they once were."

-Frederick Buechner