I often wonder about my deceased parents and parents-in-law.  What are they doing?  Where are they?

I know for a fact that they are alive and well and are busily and happily engaged in important work.  But what is that work?  Are they far away?  Do they ever look in on me and my family?

I miss their kindness, their love, and their help.  Can they still help me?  Do they ever try to do so?

Twice I have received distinct impressions that they do.

Aaron had left on his mission and gone to the Missionary Training Center in Provo, Utah.  After several weeks of studying Portuguese, the day arrived for him to board a plane and fly to far-off Brazil.

As parents, our hearts and thoughts were with our son.  We worried about his safety.  We wished we could help and encourage him.  We yearned for him in ways that only parents can understand.  We prayed for his success and well-being.

We were powerless to do a thing.  He was on his own.  But there was One who could help.  To bring that help more powerfully to him, his mother and I went to the temple on the day that Aaron would be flying to Brazil.  To merit the blessings that we were asking for Aaron, we dedicated the day to serving the Lord and to those on the other side who could not help themselves.

On the way to the temple I asked Margie, “What are our parents doing now?”  I was thinking of them, and wishing I could see them in their new surroundings and activities.

When Aaron first went to the temple several weeks earlier for his own endowment, I prepared my father’s name for temple work.  Prior to taking out his own endowment, Aaron was first baptized for my father—Aaron’s self-proclaimed “best friend.”

As Aaron was in the air and on the plane taking him to Brazil, I was in the temple serving the Lord and thinking of Aaron and of our deceased parents.  A sensation came over me very powerfully that Margie and I were not the only parents whose hearts were with Aaron.  I seemed to see my father—Aaron’s best-friend-grandfather—going along with him as his unseen companion to Brazil.

Do we have guardian angels?  I don’t really think that someone is assigned to look after me constantly, but I do think that beings from the unseen world periodically help me.  If so, who would be more natural to be there for such help than parents and relatives—people who loved us on earth?  It’s absurd to think that parents would cease loving, worrying about, and trying to help their children once they leave mortality.

The second experience that I had with deceased parents was with my parents-in-law.  No better or loving people ever lived.  Family was all-important to them.  They did everything they could for us, their children.

Dave and Zelma carried a sorrow on their hearts of which no one was aware.  That sorrow concerned an illegitimate granddaughter who could not be part of the family.  Indeed, Dave and Zelma and the baby’s father were the only family members who knew of the little girl’s existence.

The girl, Cecilia, grew up, married, and had two children of her own without having ever met her father.  Her mother and stepfather died.  She felt a yearning to know her other family.

She contacted her father.  He and his wife welcomed her into their lives with a deep sense of gratitude.  She was introduced to four sisters and brothers who had never had an inkling of a notion that she existed.  They, too, immediately loved her.

Cecilia and her two children were introduced to the extended family, including me.  Cecilia and her children, Shari and Joe, were wonderful people, and easy to love.

Cecilia and Shari each spent weeks and months with their father and grandfather.  They developed an interest in the Church.  They independently met with the missionaries.  Shari, as a 22-year old college student, became excited about what she was learning, gained a testimony, and asked to be baptized.

It was my privilege to be asked to lead the music at Shari’s baptism.  During the closing hymn, as I was leading the singing, the feeling came over me very strongly that Dave and Zelma were there.  Tears sprang to my eyes.  It was all that I could do to keep from crying openly.  I hadn’t given them one, single thought up to that moment—but suddenly they were there.  I couldn’t see them, but there was no doubt about their presence.

After the baptism I told Margie that her parents were there, and said, “Isn’t it amazing that they’d be so interested in their great-granddaughter that they’d be at her baptism?”

Margie responded matter-of-factly, “That’s not so surprising:  They probably orchestrated it.”

I liked that.  I liked that a lot.  That’s exactly what happened.  Dave and Zelma are over there pushing—drawing—their family together.  They’ve been working with Cecilia and Shari and Joe.  Without a doubt they’re working with Don and Donny, Justin, Linsey and Chelsea.

Most likely each of us receives visits and help from time to time from Dave and Zelma.  But of all the family members, it’s those who are on the fringes of the family covenant who are receiving the most attention.  I think we can count on that.

In mortality Dave and Zelma devoted 100% of their time and thinking to two over-riding concepts:  Church and family.  The two concepts are inseparable.  Dave and Zelma were married in the temple for time and all eternity.  Their children were born in that covenant.  Dave and Zelma were faithful to their covenants.  Their children are sealed to them for eternity.  As a result of that covenant, special blessings accrue to their children.  Three apostles and two Church presidents bear testimony to those blessings in the following quotation from a talk given by Elder Boyd K. Packer, in General Conference in April 1992:

“It is not uncommon for responsible parents to lose one of their children, for a time, to influences over which they have no control.  They agonize over rebellious sons or daughters.  They are puzzled over why they are so helpless when they have tried so hard to do what they should.

“It is my conviction that those wicked influences one day will be overruled.

“‘The Prophet Joseph Smith declared—and he never taught a more comforting doctrine—that the eternal sealings of faithful parents and the divine promises made to them for valiant service in the Cause of Truth, would save not only themselves, but likewise their posterity.  Though some of the sheep may wander, the eye of the Shepherd is upon them, and sooner or later they will feel the tentacles of Divine Providence reaching out after them and drawing them back to the fold.  Either in this life or the life to come, they will return.  They will have to pay their debt to justice; they will suffer for their sins; and may tread a thorny path; but if it leads them at last, like the penitent Prodigal, to a loving and forgiving father’s heart and home, the painful experience will not have been in vain.  Pray for your careless and disobedient children; hold on to them with your faith.  Hope on, trust on, till you see the salvation of God.’  (Orson F. Whitney, in Conference Report, Apr. 1929, p. 110.)

“We cannot overemphasize the value of temple marriage, the binding ties of the sealing ordinance, and the standards of worthiness required of them.  When parents keep the covenants they have made at the altar of the temple, their children will be forever bound to them.  President Brigham Young said:

“’Let the father and mother, who are members of this Church and Kingdom, take a righteous course, and strive with all their might never to do a wrong, but to do good all their lives; if they have one child or one hundred children, if they conduct themselves towards them as they should, binding them to the Lord by their faith and prayers, I care not where those children go, they are bound up to their parents by an everlasting tie, and no power of earth or hell can separate them from their parents in eternity; they will return again to the fountain from whence they sprang.’”  (Joseph Fielding Smith, Doctrines of Salvation, comp. Bruce R. McConkie, 3 vols., 2:90-91.)               —4 January 2004