It started at my grandmother Rose’s burial.

She and my Grampa Irving had been married for almost sixty-five years, so it wasn’t surprising when she lasted only two months in a world without him.

The funeral was in late June. So it also wasn’t surprising to see a dragonfly flitting around on the warm breeze as we assembled at her graveside. We settled into place for the ceremony, all her family and friends. The dragonfly did too. It landed on a nearby headstone. And stayed there.

The entire time.

The words about my grandmother went on and on while the summer sun glimmered on her tiny iridescent visitor. Sometimes it stretched its stained-glass wings, lifted off, made as if to go… and touched down again in its chosen spot.

More and more of us noticed. “It’s Irving,” someone whispered, and everyone nodded.

My parents and sister and me, too. Our branch of the family are the non-believers of the bunch, but even we felt a presence. Grampa’s lifelong inquisitiveness, his nearly lifelong attentiveness to Rose. It was *there.*

My grandparents had lived into their nineties; their son, my father, was not so lucky. He died much too young, only four years later.

There have been a few times that we’ve each felt Nurn – our silly nickname for my father – visiting, despite our steadfast unbelief. Never as a dragonfly, but that doesn’t stop us from smiling and thinking of him whenever we see them. They are our symbol of how love goes on.

Which is why, when a cloud of dragonflies suddenly swirled in the afternoon sunlight over our rented porch on Beach of My Heart last week, I ran to get my fancy camera.

Beach of My Heart is special for so many reasons. Two of them are geographical quirks. First, it faces westward across the width of Cape Cod Bay from inside the crook of Massachusetts’s bicep-curled arm, making it one of the rare East Coast locations where you can watch the sunset blaze into the sea. Second, the tide goes out, and out, and out, leaving literally a mile-plus of sculpted sand flats and warm, shallow tidepools.

Every summer of my young life, we would stay there for two weeks, and Nurn would stand on the porch of our beachside rental with his trusty movie camera and tripod, filling one flat metal film canister after another with 16-millimeter love letters to the beach. Tide coming in, tide going out, sun sizzling its rim on the ocean horizon until the water’s inevitable victory, sun descending into a glory of goldpinkorange cloudbank reflected into receding stripes of mirror-finish pools, the occasional storm lashing the waves wild on our tame little coastline. He adored it all, and he tried endlessly to record its magic for everyone to see.

The tide moves fast there; it’s got a lot of ground to cover in its six-hour pendulum swing. But not as fast as a dragonfly. And I don’t have the still-photography equivalent of my father’s years of skill in his chosen medium, not yet. So it was hard for me to capture a crisp close-up of a speed-racing, whimsically zig-zagging little speck with see-through wings, and I’m not super satisfied with the result. They didn’t make it any easier, either. None of them stopped to visit; it wasn’t that kind of moment. It was a fun challenge, not a deeply emotional one. Nurn clearly hadn’t come to see us along with a swarm of his insect friends from the Great Beyond.

It’s only now, as I’m writing this, that I’m seeing it. Seeing him, after all. He did visit us. My mother, sister, sister’s husband, their sons, and me; he loved us all completely. My stepfather, too, who would have gotten along famously with Nurn if their paths had crossed in life.

He was there. There was a tripod on the salt-silver wooden porch again. A camera on the tripod, again. Our family together there, still.

I am my father’s daughter, and love goes on.

Onwards.