The following letter was written a few years ago, to a man whose daughter had been killed—suddenly. He gave me permission to post the letter for Father’s Day.
Steve –
After you read this letter, please put it into a drawer and every month or so, pull it out and reread.
Mandy’s death shouldn’t have happened. But it did. When you say “our family is ruined,” keep in mind that is a thought, not yet the truth. That said, what you convince yourself is “true” will have a lot to do with your family’s future.
Part of your journey is reconciling your belief that “it is up to me to keep my children alive regardless of circumstances, and therefore I have failed.” Another part of the journey is remembering you are the parent of two living children.
Can you get through this horrid time and eventually enjoy being a father to Sam and Elizabeth?
Maria Papova’s recent post on Brain Pickings is worth reading:
J.D. McClatchy on the Contrast and Complementarity of Desire and Love
“Love is the quality of attention we pay to things.”
BY MARIA POPOVA
We are creatures of such staggering psychoemotional complexity that we are often opaque to ourselves, purblind to the constellation of our own thoughts, our own feelings, our chaotic and often contradictory desires — nowhere more so than in the realm of the heart. “The alternations between love and its denial,”philosopher Martha Nussbaum wrote in contemplating the difficulty of knowing ourselves, “constitute the most essential and ubiquitous structural feature of the human heart.”
Perhaps the most disorienting aspect of that interior opacity is that of distinguishing between love and desire, both electrifying in their own right and interdependent in many ways, but throughly distinct species of being. The contrast and complementarity between the two is what the late, great poet and literary polymath J.D. McClatchy (August 12, 1945–April 10, 2018) explores in the preface to Love Speaks Its Name (public library) — his lovely 2001 anthology of LGBT love poems.
With an eye to the kaleidoscopic intoxication of desire and its contradistinction to love, McClatchy writes:
A desire can be a vague wish, a sharp craving, a steadfast longing, a helpless obsession. It can signal an absence or a presence, a need or a commitment, an ideal or an impossibility. The root of the word “desire” links it to consider and to terms of investigation and augury, thereby reminding us that desire is often less what we feel than what we think about what we feel. And the still deeper root of the word links it to star and shine, as if our desires, and bright centers of our being, were also like the fixed fates in the heavens, determining the course of our lives. Indeed, our mundane experience of desire often coincides with this sense of something beyond our control, of something confusing, something driving us beyond the bounds of habit or reason. It is the heart of our hearts, the very stuff of the self. Desire explodes past borders of time or law. It drifts through veils of propriety. It cannot be confined by social expectations or strictures.
I have a passion for art so every Sunday I look forward to reading Eric Rhoads’s blog, Sunday Coffee. Eric is a painter, who was once in radio and now owns the publishing company that markets Fine Art Connoisseur and PleinAir Magazines.
Recently Eric wrote about his trip to Portland to see Sean, a friend who had suffered a stroke. As he prepares for his trip, he moves through all of the questions we all ask ourselves when we know we are going to face a person who has little time to live.
Here are the highlights of Eric’s post, When Moments Matter.
Copyright by World Economic Forum. Photo by Moritz Hager
I think there might be something special about Sheryl Sandberg. More than just the fact that she presents well and functions on little sleep.
If you don’t know Sheryl, she is COO of Facebook, known for her cutting edge book Lean In: Women, Work and the Will to Lead, and having the unfortunate first hand life-doesn’t-behave-as-expected experience of becoming a young widow. With the death of Dave, she deserved privacy, but was given little. Subsequently she co-authored Option B with Adam Grant, addressing how to be resilient in face of loss.
If you don’t remember her from the above, possibly you will remember her recently fielding questions before a Congressional hearing regarding Facebook’s responsibility in Russian interference in the last presidential election. She was no fool: she didn’t serve FB up on a platter, and yet she openly addressed Facebook’s responsibility to society.
All of it impressive.
But that’s not what I am talking about when I say I think there is something special about Sheryl Sandberg.
The other side of the coin: Talkinggrief.com recently posted What’sYourGrief.com’s article about writing a holiday card to someone who is grieving. Today we approach the dilemma from the griever’s point of view.
Carolyn Parr offers a simple outline and a very good reason why we should write others when we are struggling: “Your own truth-telling may free others to face their own situation with courage.”
Grief taught me to write the perfect holiday letter
Carolyn Miller Parr
In October of 2015 the man who had been my husband for fifty-six years died. December found me still numb with grief. As my children and I struggled to navigate the season without a compass, we were feeling a lot of things. Joy wasn’t one of them. If it was there, it was buried under a thick layer of pain.
It was time to write the annual holiday letter Jerry and I had always written together, but I felt lost. Should I just skip it and leave friends wondering whether they’d been abandoned? Should I spill tears all over the page? Should I put on a happy face to hide the pain?
HYMN TO TIME
