A Bullet Can't Shoot A Soul...

One of my biggest flaws would have to be that I have to tell people Everything. See. And none of my dreams ever come true either. They're just odd like I am.

Maybe I just have an overactive imagination but I like to think that my Grandfather has visited me from the ashes a few times in my dreams, though not for many years now but- if reincarnation is true- perhaps that's because his spirit has already been born again and he just can't anymore.

The first dream I remember having was about a year after his death- which is only a mere moment in the world of spirits- and I was standing outside a pub near I was born, near somewhere he used to also live once. I was happy to see he was okay at last, and he told me he was very happy now that he didn't have any more pain, and that he liked being where he was. It didn't surprise me that he was at the pub. He hated the nursing home that he ended up living in, and would try and escape to the car to come home with us when we visited him. Not that we went enough. It was too sad seeing him here.

I'm sure that his true self was still in his shell of a body, somewhere, on the inside- but maybe I'm not giving the disease he had enough credit. It was pretty savage on him. Maybe he had already been gone to us for a long time, even before he died, but if he had any mind left at the end- and I often wonder if he did- I think he would have been grateful that the end had come at last. He wouldn't have liked ending up the way he was, seemingly feeble and frail, not even half the man that he had been, but then, not many people get to choose the way they die. Do they.

My son would have been Grandpa's first great grandson. I can never know the relationship that they might have had, but I like to think that Grandpa visited us in another dream I had when my son was still a baby...

In it, I am walking down the road to the gate of Grandpa's farm, carrying my son in a plastic shopping bag whose handles are almost breaking from the strain. I see Grandpa sitting on the tennis court roller which has been abandoned in the paddock near the farmhouse for many years. Just up the hill are the bee hives. I walk over and introduce my baby to him. I say here he is Grandpa- and he tells me that he is glad that he had finally gotten the chance to meet him at last. We can't stay very long.

As I walk away he tells me to remember that a bullet can't shoot a soul. I have never said that out loud to anybody, before now, nor written it down, either. Perhaps that is why I think that reincarnation might be true; but it makes sense, doesn't it- when you think about it- that a material object such as a bulet should have no physical effect on the soul of a person? You can only shoot flesh, after all. You can't kill a soul.

That people have a soul I have no question about. Where the soul goes, and whom it chooses to visit, after the flesh dies is another consideration altogether, but I choose to believe that he really was there with us that night, in spirit at least.

I hope so anyway.