My beloved Lucas Martino,
The unstoppable time
pushes my life like a locomotive; noisy, fast, rumbling, deafening and
boisterous. Time does not have time for
itself and nevertheless for me, so he pushes me around without a
conscience. My writings to you become
incoherent at times such like this one, because your memories assault me at
close quarters and painfully empty my last reserve of tears. It is a different kind of pain, not the one
that hurts the flesh, but the one that tortures the spirit. Sometimes painful things can teach us lessons
that we did not think we needed to know.
These feelings do not die because I keep feeding them with memories.
Lucas, I have no
choice but to live only on memories embedded in the past because the present
has no captive memories. The future will
not bring them to me today, and if it brings them to me tomorrow; it will be already
too late.
Your death Lucas, left
a heartache no one in the Universe can heal, not the stupid and senseless gods
or the absurd and bizarre beliefs of the afterlife, but your love left a memory
no one can alter or steal. Your death brought a new lovely but terrifying
experience to my life — that of a bitter-sweet wound that will never heal, but
a son is not dead while his name is still spoken. I invoke your name
everyday Lucas. But also, your death
taught me that sometimes the strongest among us are the ones who smile through
silent pain, cry behind closed doors, and fight battles nobody knows
about. Those are us, your mother, your
sister, your brother, and your imperfect and sad father.
The hardest and
most terrorizing thing I have ever had to hear in my entire life was that my
child died. The hardest thing that I
have ever done in my entire existence is to live every day since that mortal moment.
Explaining the pain of your death is impossible, it is like trying to explain
childbirth to a woman who has never given birth. It is impossible to explain the loss of a child
to a person who has never lost one. Dry
tears flow abundantly from my tired eyes while I am writing this Lucas,
but the screen of my computer cannot record them.
Of all the special
gifts in life however great or small, to have had you as my son was the
greatest gift of all times. A special
time, a special face, a special laugh and a special son are things I cannot ever
replace. Within the confines of my old, aching
heart, I whisper in a deafening silence: I miss you Lucas, and love you
so. I gather strength from sadness and from pain. Each time I died from the pain of your loss,
I learn to live again from the memories you left me. This happens because one side of the pain
hurts me, and the other changes me. It
is amazing how someone can break your heart into a million fragments, and you
can still love them intensely with all the little pieces.
There is sacredness and
purity in tears. They deliver a message
and then, they evaporate. They are not a
sign of weakness, but of irrepressible power. They speak more eloquently than ten thousand
tongues and a billion words. They are
the messengers of overwhelming grief, of deep contrition, and of unspeakable
love. Love for you Lucas. I loved
you even on those times when we deeply disagree about things in life, and you
hated me for trying to impose my will on you, but I know that if you have never
been hated by your child, you have never been a parent.
I miss my son. I pretend to be strong as I am dying glaringly
within myself. The daily struggle is
stressing my mind and my health, but I do not surrender. On the outside I smile for you to see I am
okay because I do not want you to see that my dark grief it is killing me
altogether. With every inch of my being
I miss you in every moment of my fragile existence my son. You carried an unbearable sadness in your
heart, and I want you to know that I know how it feels. I know how it feels to cry in my pillow so no
one can hear me, I know what is going through the day and waiting to the end of
it to be alone so I can fall apart, for everything hurts so bad I just want it
all ends. I know exactly how it feels my
dear son Lucas.
Nobody has the right
to judge you, because nobody has been through what you have been through,
Lucas. They might have heard stories,
but they did not feel the pain your heart carried within. After your death, I miss me, the old me, the
happy me, the bright me, the smiling me, the laughing me, the gone me. I do not like the carcasses I am living in,
but it is all I have until we meet again.
Sometimes I feel like
putting my heart in eBay: One heart for
sale, horrible condition, little or no value.
I will take anything for it.
Please, just rip it off my chest and end this suffering. No returns.
No exceptions.
Lucas,
the vile claws of the pain from losing you has set a powerful and tight grip on
my desperate and defenseless spirit. It
has already completely destroyed my soul, brutally blasted and erased away my
dreams, and vanish any happiness I had.
Reasons for smiling were a plenty before; now, they do not exist.
Deep sadness and acid tears have replaced smiles and hopes. I am enduring a devastating and empty life
held by your mother, your sister and your brother. Perhaps I have begun
to understand you pain, Lucas. I know now what an unbearable pain is, and
how easily be held inside and how it can destroy a life. Son, I still and will always love you
unconditionally with all the power of my meaningless existence. I am not living anymore, now I am only doing
time in this timeless existence in that vast wasteland void of emotions: my
life.
I egoistically write to escape from my deep pain and dark sorrow, but I can
never get far quickly enough so they cannot catch up with me violently. I keep trying every day but the jaws of my
sadness always find me easily because they just need to follow the deep track of
my tears. I know I have no scars and I
will never have them because my wounds have not healed yet. After you left Lucas, I found out that those
shining stars I was so pleased with are just a bunch of amorphous, unclear, and
insecure glints in the dark skies. They
are that way because they live hanging to the blackness where there is not
deepness more profound than darkness.
I thought I was a real tough guy that
could take on anything in this universe, but the loss of my young son Lucas
Martino, clearly exposed how vulnerable and brittle I really am, and my
indomitable spirit once invincible, too often feels like a dragging old bag of
broken, unreachable dreams; and even the sunshine looks dizzy now to me. This is blinding me.
Our family lives a constant
struggle, painful at times, hand happy only when we think of you, Lucas. We constantly think of you. Thank you Lucas for the universe of joy and
also for the pain, because the pain hurts happiness but it cannot destroy it.
And so Lucas, life comes and goes, and life came and went, without a notice or a taste, without a whisper or a song, carving my spirit with a bitter trail of sadness and grief, sorrow and anguish, leaving me exiled in an huge aisle with the mordancy of bile. And yes, life goes on Lucas, dragging and imposing on us those nasty wounds that never heal their pain, so I keep on smiling, smiling in vain, but smiling. But that is OK Lucas because I need to keep on living with this heavy pain in my heart since I have much to pay for.
Until I see you again. I love you forever Lucas.
Dad.