Dear son,
I'm sorry I haven't written earlier. I know you've struggled - mightily - and fallen. You have contemplated the most fundamental, the most dangerous, choice in human existence. I am writing now in your hour of need.
Looking back, maybe it seems as though you arrived here through non-decisions, choices that you either failed to make or were made for you. It is thus with bitter irony that I hope this difficulty making choices will stay your hand before this final one.
Unlike most around you, I love you too much to lie. I cannot tell you you will be well some day, that you will know, reliably, happiness. I cannot tell you that you will be free from health problems, or that you will find happiness, or love, or anything that will validate the decision to live and fight. There is a real danger that, despite the best efforts of those who love you that you won't feel happy ever again, and bitterness will overtake you as the world around you dims and crystallizes.
Yet I ask you to continue. And a part of yourself, long dormant, long mute, asks you to continue.
Your lingering compassion, your sense of justice, your creativity and intelligence - they all demand more time, and time better spent. But most of all, your sacred honor - the honor that transcends religion, or heredity, or culture, as difficult as it is to conceive - your sacred honor calls you. It calls you to not leave unfinished, or diminished, the vague but real destiny that you choose to build and own. It calls you to put necessity over your fears, your doubts, and paradoxical pride. The necessity is this - you must feel you are doing good by those who love you, and whom you could yet love.
It fights against decades of conditioning, irrational thinking, and faulty reasoning about protecting yourself, and protecting others from you. I am sorry that I was not there, and was not healthy enough, to dissuade you, to reassure you, as good men and good fathers ought. I'm sorry I shot down your dreams of a career in writing, and instilled within you, as far as I was able, a worship of the technical over the creative. I'm sorry I was too selfish and too weak as a man to embrace the responsibility for your emotional well-being. I'm sorry I threatened you and your mother with physical violence. I'm sorry you were trapped with me at various time when I was out of control.
But - and this is important - you cannot let it stop you from what you need to do. For you need to do things on this earth for yourself and for the greater world. You were given some talent, which, through your hard work and the mentoring of others, you grew to a decent capacity for reason and a store of knowledge. You were given some love, again, which you were able to grow into a sense of compassion and justice. And perhaps, counterintuitively, your traumas and disappointments gave you both idealism and compassion, placing you, the wounded, in the position of healer and protector.
The more you worry about your own vulnerabilities, the more they will become magnified, until they consume your life and self-respect. That is too high a price to pay.
I do not ask you to have hope - though I pray hope makes its way back into your life. What I ask, and beg, is not forgiveness, but for you to find greater strength than I was able to - strength in the form of humility, of humor, and of compassion.
To give you the courage you need to heal and triumph, I would spend ten eternities in the worst hell. For what hell could be greater than the realization I failed my son?
Fight. Love. Dream. But even if all else deserts you, live. Not because life itself is so precious - but because you will find a way to make it so.
Love,
Father
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