Dear Alex,
This is now my first year without you.
It would have been the 30th year we shared.
Grief support groups tell me that writing a
Letter to you will help me, somehow.
So …
Our broken dreams now lay as icy shards on the pavement
And we all must find ways
To travel beyond with shoeless souls.
We are never the same
Once we have passed through
The crucible of that pain, awakening to
The aching hope for the rising of a familiar sun.
We can no longer meet ourselves
With the confidence with which
We once knew ourselves
For that poor child within us is gone.
In moments of fear, as all hearts fear,
Life can seem to be a lonely undiscovered path
Toward a never fully discoverable sense
Of our place in the world as a human being.
We hold our unique grief uniquely ..
All the same, we are united with others in the certainty that
The dark shadow of grief hovers somewhere waiting
Over us all as we slide along our one-way path through life’s joys.
Yet I think that this same grief can give us a new form of strength
To empathetically face the love in the world
With newly opened eyes and naked hearts
Feeling even the embrace of sun, wind, and rain in new ways.
I shall miss you always, my son,
And I will continue to learn of myself through my memories of you
As I become an always different man
Clinging to views of the love that you gave to me.
Thank you also, my young soulmate,
Who, so different from me, learned to carry a mirror that helped me
Reveal my self to myself
Through the ways that we loved each other.
Thank you for sharing a life of joy and tears
Shining the hope that I could always
Become more of me
Then I could have imagined alone.
I only now am realizing how you led me to
Discover the great unfolding love in the world
Reflected in the dark wisdom
Brewing always like hot coffee behind your eyes.
I never fully understood the way deep anxiety consumed you.
I could sense it’s sharp teeth only when
your frustrations found angry voice.
And I never realized that the hopes I set out for you
We’re hurdles that you felt you could never cross.
We had roles in each other’s lives
Which, while living them, we could not see.
My hopeful expectations were your dark anxieties.
I know now that some of what I withheld from you as a child
Were your healthy means of handling your anxiety.
I will not — nor ever think that
I could — move beyond and get over
The grief of losing you,
But I will learn to carry this grief proudly.
It is so much better that I have
Loved you and lost you to unkind winds
Than that I might have
Never felt you breathing love
into my outreaching life at all.
Dad