your Buddha quote made me thinking if he had also said about the opposite:
Like, for example, "Neither fire nor wind, birth nor death can erase our bad deeds. ~ Buddha"
I have no knowledge of Buddha's teaching, the only reason I ask, is, because I wanted to share this article with you and all other C99pers, as I found it so disturbing to say the least.

The Concentration Camp Victim Who Never Was

A supposed former prisoner at Stutthof concentration camp attracted attention around the world when he hugged an a man accused of being a former guard during his criminal trial and offered his forgiveness. The story seemed too good to be true -- and it was.
...

On Nov. 12, a scene inside the packed Courtroom 300 at the Hamburg District Court in Germany made headlines around the world. It was the seventh day of the criminal trial against former concentration camp guard Bruno D., who is now 93 years old. He stands accused of having aided and abetted in the murder of 5,230 people in 1944 and 1945, while stationed at the Stutthof concentration camp near Danzig, as Gdansk was then called.
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That November day, Moshe Peter Loth took the stand as a witness in the case. The 76-year-old of Port Charlotte, Florida, had joined the case as a co-plaintiff to testify as a Stutthof survivor. At the end of his testimony, according to several people who were present at the proceedings, Loth turned and told the courtroom spectators: "Watch out everyone, I will forgive him now." He asked the presiding judge if he could come forward and then bent down to the defendant, who was sitting in a wheelchair.

That story rubbed me the wrong way this morning and I needed to get it out of my head by posting it here and then hopefully forget about it.

You lifted my mood with your quotation and the painting, and that's difficult these days.

I'm sorry for your family's loss.

your family has suffered a loss. I know you are glad to be able to lend them support.
A perfect time and place for stories is at the family gatherings before and after funerals. It is a great way to honor and remember loved ones, to tell the stories about their lives.

Where the Semicolon Meets the Soul.

When I am with no one but myself
I might muster the will to stop letting others define me
with the power of their hurled definitions
predicated on who I should be
in relation to some concrete or abstract other, some ideal,
beyond the boundaries of who I already am.
I might write like Jack Kerouac …
exploring complex, difficult subjects inhabiting my constant tussle
between inner and outer, individual and social, private and performative.

Maybe I’d REALLY try to fool you
if my first name ended in a, and I owned three bras, and I’d been pregnant five times.
But those details don’t matter since I predate the invention of women by decades.
I am the generic he, as in, “If anybody needs an abortion he will have to go to another state,”
“A writer knows which side his bread is buttered on.”
That’s me, the writer, him. I am a man. Not maybe a first-rate man.
I’m perfectly willing to admit that I may be in fact a kind of second-rate or imitation man,
a Pretend-a-Him.
I am to a genuine male him as a microwaved fish stick is to a whole grilled Chinook salmon.

With “the beard and the guns and the wives and the little short sentences” Hemingway did man right.
He would have died rather than have syntax or semicolons. And he did. He shot himself.
A short sentence. Anything rather than a long sentence, a life sentence.
Death sentences are short and very, very manly.
Life sentence goes on and on,
full of syntax and qualifying clauses and confusing references and getting old.

Shamelessly. I have allowed myself to get old and haven’t done one single thing about it.
My tenses get all mixed up. There must have been something that a real man could have done.
Something short of guns, but more effective than Oil of Olay. What was the use?
If I’m no good at pretending to be a man and no good at being young,
I might just as well start pretending that I am an old woman.

*From Ursula K. Le Guin on Being a Man by Brain Pickings

Sorry to learn of you family's loss; sending virtual hugs.

I'm sorry for your family's loss.

In thinking of you, and your closeness to the child in you, I thought of this ...

Dragonfly

Once, in a little pond, in the muddy water under the lily pads,
there lived a little water beetle in a community of water
beetles. They lived a simple and comfortable life in the pond
with few disturbances and interruptions.

Once in a while, sadness would come to the community when one of
their fellow beetles would climb the stem of a lily pad and
would never be seen again. They knew when this happened; their
friend was dead, gone forever.

Then, one day, one little water beetle felt an irresistible urge
to climb up that stem. However, he was determined that he would
not leave forever. He would come back and tell his friends what
he had found at the top.

When he reached the top and climbed out of the water onto the
surface of the lily pad, he was so tired, and the sun felt so
warm, that he decided he must take a nap. As he slept, his body
changed and when he woke up, he had turned into a beautiful
blue-tailed dragonfly with broad wings and a slender body
designed for flying.

So, fly he did! And, as he soared he saw the beauty of a whole
new world and a far superior way of life to what he had never
known existed.

Then he remembered his beetle friends and how they were thinking
by now he was dead. He wanted to go back to tell them, and
explain to them that he was now more alive than he had ever been
before. His life had been fulfilled rather than ended.

But, his new body would not go down into the water. He could
not get back to tell his friends the good news. Then he
understood that their time would come, when they, too, would
know what he now knew. So, he raised his wings and flew off
into his joyous new life!

~Author Unknown~