Letters to My Son: Do Not Waste Your Time Wondering if I Loved You

My dear son,

We have spent our lives pretending that time is something we possess, like a heavy coat or a set of keys. It is not. We are what time does to a body, a slow erosion of the will until only the essentials remain.

I have watched you grow from a frantic collection of limbs into a man who carries the weight of the world with a familiar stoat-like persistence. It is a strange business, being a father. It is the art of watching someone you love walk toward a horizon you will never reach.

I want to speak to you about the end of things, not because I’m morbid, but because I’m honest. The world is full of people who will tell you that grief is a mountain to be climbed or a river to be crossed.

They’re wrong.

Grief is not a journey. It’s a climate. It’s the air you breathe when the weather changes and stays changed.

When the chair is empty and the voice has gone into the floorboards, don’t try to learn how to live without me. That’s a fool’s errand. To live without someone who has been stitched into your very skin is to live as a ghost.

Instead, you must learn to live with my love in a different way. It is a shift in the light, a recalibration of the inner ear.

I have always been a man of few words, mostly because words are clumsy tools for delicate work.

But the love I have for you is a stubborn thing. It does not require my physical presence to persist. It is like the wind; you cannot see the thing itself, only the way the grass bends in its wake.

When I am gone, do not look for me in the cemeteries. I never liked the cold, and I certainly don’t intend to start liking it then.

Look for me in the way you hold your coffee cup, or the way you pause before answering a question you already know the answer to.

We are blended, you and I. There is no surgical way to remove a father from a son without tearing the whole fabric.

My failures are yours, as are my small, quiet victories. You carry my gait. You carry my skepticism. You carry the specific way I used to squint at the horizon as if expecting a ship that never arrives. This is not a haunting. It’s a continuation.

If the silence becomes too loud, close your eyes. The world is too busy anyway. Behind your eyelids, the geography does not change.

I am there, standing by the door, or sitting in the corner wondering where I put my glasses. It is a private theater where we can sit together without the need for explanations. And when the sun is out, do not look at the sky. The sky is indifferent. Look at your shadow. It is a dark, faithful companion that follows you across the pavement.

I am in that darkness too.

I am the shape you cast on the earth. It is a physical fact that you cannot have light without a shadow, and you cannot have your life without the silhouette of those who came before you.

I remember once watching you play in the garden when you were very small. You were trying to catch a bird, your hands outstretched, your face a mask of absolute, terrifying hope. I knew even then that the bird would fly away. I knew that life is mostly a series of things flying away. But the effort was the point. The reaching was the thing that mattered. I’m still reaching for you, even now, across this table, across this impending silence.

People are terrified of the quiet. They fill it with radios, with chatter, with the clatter of forks against plates. They think the quiet is a void. It is not. The quiet is where the truth sits when it is tired of shouting.

I want you to sit with me in that quiet. When the house is still and the day has finally given up, sit down and do nothing.

Do not think.

Do not remember.

Just be.

You will find that I have not left. There is no leaving when one soul is blended with another. We are like two liquids poured into the same glass. You can try to separate them, but you will only succeed in breaking the glass.

The moment you find a coin on the street.

The moment you realize the rain has stopped.

The moment you see a joke and have no one to tell it to.

When I go, it will be a quiet departure. No fanfare. Just a door closing softly in another room. Do not waste your time wondering if I loved you. It is written in the way I corrected your posture and the way I stayed up late listening for your key in the lock.

Love is not a feeling; it is a long, slow labor. It is the work of staying, even when everything in you wants to run. I stayed. I am still staying.

I will be in the shadows.

I will be in the way you breathe when you are thinking about nothing at all.

There is no leaving. There is only a change in the frequency.

That is where I will always be.

Wait for me in the quiet. I am already there.

Dad

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This post was previously published on medium.com.