Grandpa Harland

My Dad recently emailed me this picture of Grandpa Harland's grave marker along with the story behind it:

This is John Harland's grave marker.  The stone is one of a dozen or so dragged up from the valley of the Drywood/Yarrow river in the early days by Grandpa Stanley Harland with horses and stoneboat.  

When he went to the river for water, he would unhitch the horses from the stone boat, hook them onto a sandstone block, and drag it a little at a time up the river bank.  When he got the block to the top, he would get it onto the stoneboat, and then take it to the farm, a distance of about 3/4 of a mile(?) This is one of the smaller rocks; several are much larger.  Maybe the larger ones he had to drag all the way, a little distance a day. I am not sure about that.  Uncle John had told about this, so I hope I got the details more or less accurate.

Grandpa Harland passed away in April this year. I always looked forward to visiting him and his farm was full of adventures to my young imaginative mind. I can't remember a specific instance when he told me he loved me, but I felt it often in his quiet gentle manner. When I was in Grade 1, I was sent home as a suspected lice case. I remember feeling humiliated and even contaminated. At lunch I was quarantined to the front step outside my house where I ate my chicken noodle soup in isolation. Grandpa Harland came to join me so I wouldn't feel lonely. We didn't talk very much as we ate our lunch but he was one of those people, like my Grandpa Stoddard, whose company you wholeheartedly enjoy in silence. Sometimes what I like best is just being with someone you love, thinking about your feelings, rather than saying them aloud. In our culture, silence is often construed as something awkward or a lack- a lack of thoughts and feelings. To me silence is a comfortable space to stretch out with my thoughts and feelings, to reflect on and make sense of them without the constraint of trying to express those things in words, which often feel too inadequate to express the whole meaning. 

Our whole family was able to be at Grandpa Harland's funeral where my Dad talked about Grandpa Harland. He said something that Elder Mervyn B. Arnold's talk at conference yesterday seemed to echo. Dad talked about how the greatest tribute we can pay to our loved ones that have passed away is to strive to develop those characteristics we admired in them. Elder Arnold talked about a good name being the most valuable thing we can leave our children. They are really the same thing seen from two perspectives. This conference made me ponder on the character I want to have and what a blessing righteous character is to ourselves and to the generations of posterity that follow us. 

As a child and teenager I have often had a selfish tendency to see just me- my decisions, my actions- to evenly naively think that the consequences would only affect me. I still have selfish tendencies but I am also growing to realize how interconnected I am with the family who have lived before me and those who will come after me. My decisions, my actions, my character will affect my children, my grandchildren, my great-grandchildren just as surely as the decisions, actions and character of my parents, grandparents, and great-grandparents have influenced me. The eternal roles of child-parent, parent-child that form chains across the generations are especially beautiful when each link is strong, each gaining and giving strength to the links around it.