Impermanence

My father was big on Zen. I’m actually big on Zen, in my own way. But a certain degree of redefinition is required for that statement to make any sense

I have lost all of my grandparents and had done so by the time I was ten years old. My father’s father I never knew. The next one to go was my mother’s mother, when I was maybe two or three. Memories of her are nothing but sensory: I remember her smell, and her laugh, and her gentle touch. When I was a couple of years older, my mother’s father died of liver cancer. I had many happy memories of him, including kissing him goodbye with his toothpick in his mouth and watching with a kind of morbid fascination as he gave himself a shot of insulin in his leg every night. The last grandparent I lost was my father’s mother, who was unstable and hospitalized when she was younger but had grown frail and calm in her old age. They are all with me, all of the time. Weirdly, my strongest connection is with my maternal grandmother, who I knew only for my first few years.
I was attached to my grandparents as I knew them, but I have never felt any kind of overwhelming sadness when I remember them. For me, they are always around. They stay in my mind and my conscience, and every time I do something stupid I feel them looking at my, eyebrows uplifted, almost saying “I told you so.” They are never angry or disappointed, just there. Patient and calm beyond any memories, they preside.

Zen would say, remove from your attachments all those things which are impermanent. Things which break, die, and fade away… they cause you to suffer. They will continue to cause you to suffer, and they will impede your path to Enlightenment.

Zen would say, your grandparents died and caused you to suffer.

I reply, “Perhaps for a moment I wept for them, but then I grasped them in their spirit, and ever since they have brought me joy.”

So what is impermanent?