Dragonflies

Here's a short story that I thought of today. I know it's not my usual stuff I hope you like it. As always looking for your comments Fearless Reader so don't be shy!

DRAGONFLIES

When I was about six or seven my grandmother died. It was the first death I had ever experienced that was deeply personal to me. When I stood before the casket I didn't cry, I furrowed my brow and was struggling with the concept of never seeing someone who had been in my life ever since I could remember.
I approached my Mom and asked her if I would ever see Grandma again. She told me something that I carried with me.
"You will sweetheart. You won't see the grandma you're used to but she will visit you again. Honey, Grandma has gone to heaven and when that happens your body leaves too. But when I was a little girl you're age my Momma told me that the people who mean the most to us come back to visit us even when they go to heaven. You see God doesn't want us to spend our lives alone, he sends our loved ones back to us as dragonflies," she said.
"Mommy how can that be? Grandma was too big to fit inside of a little dragonfly," I stated matter-of-factly with my hands on my hips.
"Baby not all of Grandma goes inside the dragonfly. Just her soul, the part of her that you loved most, all the best things about Grandma," she told me then patted me on the back. She walked away then and the rest of the day I don't really remember much. I spent most of it thinking about what my Mom had told me.
I hadn't thought about that for a numbers of years, because the next time I remember thinking about it was yesterday. I'm now eighteen and since my Grandmother's death I haven't had to experience any other close family deaths until two months ago.
You see my father was a career soldier. Spent his whole life there, until the day he died. He met my mother while on leave in Alberta and she came east with him to Ontario after spending four weeks without seperating. They had fallen madly in love and got married and shortly after that Mom started a coffee shop, she still owns and operates to this day. But Daddy was an army man. Loved it, thought what he was doing was a real difference maker. He told me that what they don't show on the news is the suffering of the people who live in other places around the world. There are a lot of places that aren't as amazing as ours. He told me that he was fighting so that they would have a chance to maybe have something better, something like what we have at home. He said he was fighting to keep the bad people away from his home, from his country.
Two months ago I got a call from his commanding officer. He had been killed while rescuing a group of trapped civilians and battered friendly troops from a Taliban assualt in a city in Afghanistan. I lost my hero. I wept on the phone with his commander. I couldn't help it. I had lost a mentor, a friend, an advisor and most of all a father.
This morning I was sitting on my deck sipping a coffee and watching the sunrise and I felt something land on my wrist. I went to swat it instinctively but when I looked down I saw a dazzling red and orange dragonfly. He sat there and seemed to look at me and moved his wings up and down like he was stretching them. The early sunlight was catching the brilliance of his colour and made him look even more majestic and fantastic.
I cried this morning. I wept as I looked at that dragonfly on my wrist. It sat with me for what seemed like hours but was really only minutes.
"I love you so much Daddy," I said the words I didn't had the opportunity to say. With a few more beats of it's wings the dragonfly lept up and flew away towards the rising sun.
Perhaps he had come down from heaven, to tell me he loved me one last time, to give me peace. To say goodbye.