Not too long after my Jake went to Heaven, someone asked me if I had found out anything about him that surprised me.
I said no.
Confidently I said this and I can’t say I spent much time at all in wondering what this person might be thinking about (they happen to love Jake very much) and even as suspicious as I tend to be, I didn’t consider that they might know something I didn’t.
I do recall thinking very vaguely that it was a somewhat strange question. The first reason I thought this was that I don’t believe people change very much. Oh, yeah, you moderate some and we can alter our behavior, and I am not saying we can’t change, but to change your personality or the natural responses you might indulge in given your individual psyche is a really difficult thing to do.
My observations tell me it doesn’t happen very often.
So Jake leaving this Earth at the age of 27 like he did, surely meant there had been enough time away from us as family that he could have become someone different than the Jake that had grown up in our household. But I doubted that.
The second reason was based on the first: we had always been an openly conversant family and when you combine that with sons who did not have rebellious natures, knowledge problems tend