Dear Jordan,
Saturday mornings are the hardest.
It is late fall 2007, barely a year since your dad died. I take you to the park before your afternoon nap and there are weeks when I am the only mother there. It took me awhile to figure out why. It is daddy day. The mothers, I assume, are still sleeping, or reading the newspaper. Perhaps having lattes. I look out of place among the fathers chasing wobbly toddlers, or maybe I just feel that way.
There is nothing I would rather do on those mornings than watch you chase a bird or crunch leaves in your hands, but that weekly reminder of your father’s absence can be wrenching. Once I sobbed so hard pushing you on a swing that I startled you. I did not hide my sorrow because in time you will understand that tears cleanse the soul like rain does the soil.
When the time is right, I will tell you the reason for my suffering. And I will show you the myriad ways in which your father is remembered—from the army training base in the Mojave Desert that was renamed FOB King after his death, to the quilt two strangers handmade for you in his honor.
For now, all I want for you is a typical childhood. So far our world revolves around playgroups, bubble baths, and endless readings of Wheels on the Bus. I rise when you do at 6 a.m., even though your dad used to tease that watching me wake up was like watching a baby suck a lemon.
The holidays can be cruel, though not even our first Father’s Day was as torturous as the first winter after your father’s death. That would have been our first holiday season as a family. On Thanksgiving, Charles would have held my hand and prayed over the Cornish hen and candied yams. He would have told God how much we had to be thankful for in the past year. On Christmas Day, he would have taken us to Central Park, just as he had promised. When we returned home, I would have put on holiday music and made hot apple cider.
Even in the depth of my grief over what we would have done and now would never be, I could not ignore your first Christmas.
So on Christmas morning in 2006, just two months after your dad died, I watched you play with the wrapping paper and bows and pay little attention to the music box and stuffed animals. Then I zipped you in a fleece snowsuit and took you to Central Park alone. In a horse-drawn carriage, you and I snuggled under a blanket while the driver pointed out landmarks and I tried to smile. I could not keep it up. The driver seemed confused about why I was riding alone with a baby and weeping on Christmas Day. I told him.
When he helped me to the ground at the end of the trail, he said, “No charge.” In a city that has away of magnifying loneliness, it was an act of kindness I will never forget.
A few months ago, when you were about a year and a half, you started pointing to pictures of your father and saying “Daddy.” I felt a rush of excitement the first time you said it, but then sadness. I was just so sorry that your father would never hear you say that beautiful word. Mostly, I was sad for you—that you will never again fall asleep in his arms, never feel his hand on your back on a park swing, never watch him shave.
And yet because of the journal he left, you will know your dad more intimately than many people know fathers who are living. Your father wrote a letter to you on the last page of the journal that I hope you will treasure as I do.
I also hope that what I have written will help you to understand the remarkable love your father and I shared. I want you to have that kind of love, Jordan. It is not the kind that always looks perfect. It is not the kind in which you promise never to go to bed mad. We sometimes did. No, it is more consequential than that.
It is the kind that will enable you to imagine loving a woman’s wrinkled face someday, not simply the one that glows on your wedding day. It is a love that does not ask her to be anyone other than who she is, and that does not ask any more of you.
It also requires you to go on with your life if hers is cut short. You will talk, scream—or write—your way through the pain, because she would have expected no less.
It is not easy to teach all this by example. Grieving is a process you survive one heartbeat at a time, but finding the fortitude to endure is one of life’s true wonders.
Before Charles was taken from me, I had never experienced death, except as a reporter covering a story. I always assumed I would be angry at God if someone close to me died. Just the opposite happened. There were days when my memories and prayers were all that got me through. Others were brightened by the most unexpected things. A box of herbal teas arrived with a note from a friend I had not heard from in years. A woman I worked with in Cleveland more than a decade ago sent us a collection of carols to help us through the holidays. A stay-at-home mother who lives in our building slipped a note under our door offering to sit with you if I needed a hand. Strangers who read about our loss sent cards and books and stuffed animals. A group of high school students from Connecticut wrote you letters that I am saving in a special box. The Art Institute of Chicago awarded your father an art degree posthumously.
The pain of losing the man I love still permeates my entire being, but so much munificence has been a salve. That is not to say I am the woman I used to be, the one who squealed at sunsets and danced barefoot in the living room. Because of your father’s devotion, though, I am no longer the woman who did not believe in everlasting love.
Perhaps much further along in my healing I will find someone’s hand to hold again. It is just too soon to imagine it. A boyfriend from college was in town recently and asked me out to dinner, and I accepted at the urging of family and friends. He had heard about your father’s death but had probably not intended to spend the entire evening listening to me talk about him. My old friend was gracious—but he also wanted to know what I was doing to reclaim the feisty, vivacious woman he had known. I said that she was still deep within, but that I was not ready to think of myself as anything other than Charles’s widow.
I will never be the same person I was, but I will be whole again, in time. What I pray for most is to be the kind of mother Charles deserved for his only son.
My prayer for you, Jordan, is that you carry with you the knowledge that you will always have two parents guiding you through life. I will rely on a mother’s intuition to show you the way, but that alone will not be enough to teach you to be a man. For that, I give you your father’s journal, and the wisdom it contains:
Mission accomplished.