Dear Lucas,
I am writing to you from the deep, fathomless dark bottom of
my aching old heart. I need to write my
feelings and thoughts to you because I have no one else in this world who can
understand the torture of my anguish. Trying
to measure my pain is like trying to measure time: I try to measure the
measureless and the immeasurable.
Lucas, when you left me behind hopelessly trapped in this intense
fissure of hurt and pain, you took with you a lot more than just your beautiful
life and your undying smile. You took my
dreams of you, my hopes and all my possibilities for a happy life. I was left with just a few crumbs of a broken
spirit, an empty heart, and drained sack of lifeless dreams.
But this is not your fault Lucas. I cannot aspire to ever understand the abyss
of the pain you were living through in your young and short life while crossing
this acid bucket of existence. Knowing
you, I know certainly that perhaps it was the way it had to be. And that hurts even more because it is dismal
and oppressive.
Lucas, your death was tremendously painful and it was the
greatest loss in my life. This big loss
left behind another extreme loss: the way I am dying every day inside while I
try to perform this ruthless job of being alive.
How do I cope with this infinite pain? It is not easy Lucas, but I try to think that
that imagination is always stronger and influential than knowledge; that unfunded
myth is more potent and more plentiful than history; and that my dreams of you are
more powerful than any fact; and I want to believe that the intangible and unrealistic
“hope” does not triumph over experience, and finally; that all those laughs of
yours you left me with are the only cure for my boundless grief. I think this because my love for you Lucas will
be always stronger and higher than death.
I promise you Lucas that I will smile through trouble; I will draw strength
from my distress and from my suffering, and I will grow courageous by reflecting
on the footprints of the wonderful human being you were. With your death I learned that the invisible boundaries
which divide the end of life from the beginning of death are at best ghostly, nebulous,
and elusive. I cannot tell where the one
ends, and where the other begins. I can
tell that, for the traveler, the transition is swift; but for those of us left in
the boardwalk of life, is eternal.
Love you kid.
Your Dad