My beautiful son Lucas
Martino died before he turned 17 years old. It was an unthinkable loss. My family never lost hope on him, but my wife
wrongly thought that her God would answer her prayers. She learned the hard way that her God did not
care a bit about it. She came to understand
that, unlike the gods; death is real.
When someone we love so much suddenly goes away forever at
the hands of the cold death, our lives become deeply threadbare. When that loved someone is our own young and
vibrant child, we are irremediable frayed eternally and everlastingly. Letting go of the dreadful mind-set of sadness
and hopeless is never a real possibility. It is then when you come to realize that past,
present, and future collapse into a crude and painful reality. And
this new reality will last forever.
This violent and vicious event shook all the foundations,
beliefs, and convictions of my life.
With that, I have lost and smashed many parts of my existence. I know where did he go, but I do not know where
I will go. Oh, Lucas, I miss you so
much!
During the first days of Lucas’ death, and continuously in
every moment of every day of my existence, pounding feelings of failure, desperate
vulnerability, bottomless depression, acid remorse, profound grief, and an
enormous sensation of guilt coming from nowhere; still demolishing my hard existence;
but I keep on enduring the hard trade of keeping on living my bereft life.
My spirit was living in Happy Land, but it was hopelessly exiled
to Heartbreaking Land, and now he lives there, casted out, corrosively feeding
on that gone now, short and happy past.
Lucas, your death affected everything in my once broad and happy world. It has now changed perpetually. All my hopes, high and low, got obturated and
stopped to be with your death.
The deafening noise of the emptiness you left behind keeps
on resounding in every corner of my piteous existence. Since I do not have a family anymore, it is particularly
hard to survive without them, but now my memories of you and some close friends
maintain me afloat in this briny sea of life, were I am just a small island in
the middle of nowhere.
I feel like my journey of life has no goal or aim, no
destination and no purpose, but I will keep on fighting for your brother
Antonio and your sister Giuliana. They
are my only life line to existence and purpose now. I love them to death. Your absence is the difference between the
fight of die living, and live dying. In
any case, it is a small and lesser life.
I was just your father, and I just cannot even envision how your mother
feels.
The funny thing about my current life Lucas is that all
people who know my ghastly pain think that I am a very strong person. Poor and unconscious people, if they just
knew... This journey of mine through the
unbreakable wastes left by death is unique just to me. Even for other parents who have lost a child
and our pain is very similar; our journeys are unique to every one of us and
every single pain, it hurts us differently.
There is no a road map for this dreadful peregrination, but the one we chart
with our tears and pains.
I was so unprepared for your death Lucas, it was so unsuspected! Everything I knew about life and death certainty
was simply mistaken. People think that a
loss is a loss, but this kind of loss has no measuring stick, no table of pain,
no index of suffering, no deepness chart for grief, no graph for sorrow, and no
diagram for regret. It is just brutally terminal
in all ends and levels. There is not a useful
tragedy measuring device to gauge the amount of tragedy of a death by suicide.
Painful losses will never stop inflowing our brittle lives. Disastrous and unfortunate losses will keep on
occurring as much as we believe that they will not. At least I know now Lucas how the deepest
losses of all it feels like. Through my loss
of you Lucas Martino, I am still to discover within this tormenting suffering, what
would now be the greatest strength of my handicapped life.
The thing I dread the most Lucas, is my unfinished fatherhood
with you. Now, going through a difficult
time of emotional turmoil and perplexity in my life, I keep on asking myself: Am I still a father? Am I still YOUR father? Or I am
just an unfinished father? Because of
this, I often feel incompetent and curtailed.
But life goes on Lucas, so I have to keep on living with the reminding ache
that life murdered you. I wish you happiness wherever you are.
Love
you son.