Humans have long been keen to find the route to eternal life: pills, potions, spells and more, all the in the quest to capture the secret of lasting influence and experience. What has been forgotten in this, however, is that living on as an individual is, well, impossible (to start with), but is also not the point.
Last September in a hellish few weeks, we suddenly lost both my mum and my father-in-law. Having no experience of death before, this completely threw my two children, aged 3 and 5 at the time. Quite determined to live forever, my daughter is unimpressed with the concept of death, but we’ve adopted the narrative that people have to die so that other people get a turn at living; Grandma, for example, had to die so that one day Mummy can have a turn at being a grandma.
Over the last 6 months though, I’ve come to the realisation that my mum isn’t really gone at all. Turns out, low and behold, she’d discovered the truth to eternal life; she was a teacher.
Over 5 decades she taught countless children and adult too, not just when she was in the classroom, but when she left teaching and visited local primary schools to teach pupils about their local history and the wildlife in my home village. When I was growing up, and even when I visited home as an adult, we would be frequently stopped in the street or talked to by her ex-pupils who invariably said ‘I remember you taught me…’.
After she died in September, the messages came in droves. Having become a key figure in the community, there were literally hundreds of dedications, many from people she’d taught. Again, lots of ‘I remember she taught me…’.
And that’s what we do. We teach, we talk, we share our lives and our values with children. Sometimes those values will stick, and they’ll be passed on. Mum, having been told as a child by her nan, ‘you should always say good morning to people; you might be the only person to talk to them all day.’, passed that message to me, and I’ve passed it to my children. I also pass it to my students, and I’m sure she did to her pupils.
And so it will continue. Those values, that care, those messages and that knowledge will be passed on. Eventually we will become unhugable (ie, our bodies weaken and leave), but if we teach with compassion, care and dedication, the values and ideas that form us stick around. And what more could we want of eternal life than that?
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