Today’s daily writing prompt from our friends at WordPress is another irresistible one: “Picture the one person in the world you really wish were reading your blog. Write her or him a letter.”
The obvious, but impossible, choice would be my husband Jim, but this blog would not exist but for his untimely death. So I’m going to do a linguistic semi-cheat and go for the single audience comprised by a collective noun: our children.
Sometimes it’s much easier to write than to speak.
How I wish this blog didn’t exist.
Strictly speaking, it came into being thanks to one of you: you managed to figure out that after I had finished writing for you (a massive tome for you to read someday), I still needed to write for me. You made the blog technologically idiot-proof, and even manage to stifle groans when teaching me baby steps like making a link and uploading a picture. You are very patient.
But of course the blog exists–as one of my many forms of therapy–because of the audience of one it can’t have: your dad, whom you and I and the world should have had for so much longer.
When you all went back to school and plowed ahead with your education, work, projects, music, dancing, and vast arrays of art and hobbies, you honored him.
When you need to pause and reflect, that honors him, too.
Whenever you may need to ask for help in dealing with the unfathomable pain of all this, you honor him.
Whatever it takes for you and for me to get through each day is what he would want for us.
You honor him whenever you learn something new, and whenever you teach something.
When you are able to torture your extended family with devilish word puzzles around the Thanksgiving table, that honors dad, too–as do the times you let a chuckle escape, or give me the set up to utter the words your dad would have spoken (“Can you take the cannoli, mom?” You ask in a bakery, your arms already laden. I pause the beat your dad would have waited, “Should I leave the gun?”).
I think the only thing I could do to dishonor your dad would be not to do my best to take care of you and of myself (though I fall down on the job there sometimes), not to try to treasure the times when the Earth remains beneath my feet for both of us.
He fought so hard to have more time to be with us, to take us away for a family adventure when he felt well enough to do it, and to be home with you when the time came to hand off this life and legacy to us.
You make him so proud.
Love, more than words could ever say,
Mom
Love in the Spaces 