January 2025

 

I am writing this to my beloved son. You are always on my mind. I love you, I worry about you, and I want the best for you. But this is about me, for you.

January 2025

We are born and we are unaware. I am now 54 and I am aware. I spend a lot of time in my mind and I worry, I love, I fear, I anger, I motivate, I procrastinate, I do it all. Every hour and every day. Through all of these years I make choices, every day, every hour, every minute. I turn left and I turn right. Why? Because I can. I have helped people I have hurt people. I atone and I accept thanks. I am but a man making his way in the world. This is my path.

I think that what motivates me is to experience. I think that what makes me love and hate life are people. My stress, my anxiety is an internal mechanism to protect me from the people that do harm to me. But I cause that harm to myself. I see pain in others and it negatively affects me. I cannot cope when I see others stress I have learned, somewhat consciously, to "turn off" and avoid people when they are in pain. It is not my skill to support others that don't seek support. I am here for those people but I have learned, and make this choice, to not step into it. We each have our purpose. I no longer intervene. I stay at the boundary of other people's space and wait to be invited in. It is now happening less and less. Nobody invites me into their space anymore. I am okay with this now. I do not need to push my way into people's space and try to help them, change them, make them who I want them to be for me. People are either connected to me or they are not. I understand now that I am at the center of no-one's universe. I am ok now with only being a minor player in other's lives. I am ok with not being important to anyone. Those that wish me to love them can come find me. I no longer need that from other people. I am happy waiting for others to find me. I am now okay with this. Message to the world: Come find me if you want to spend time with me, if you value me. I will find you when I want to love you.

I have begin preparing for my end. I watch my father begin to forget. I watch my father begin to disappear. My mom says it is the long goodbye. This too is my fate if I am so fortunate to live another day. I try to visit both more frequently and now I feel I must act quickly to capture the essence, the history, the legacy of our lives. Why would anybody care about me in a hundred years? I know very little about my grandparents, great grandparents, but what I do know I want to share. I think my purpose now is to look at my Kin, of the past, and capture their stories so I can pass them to my son, so that hopefully he can carry the legacy of our family forward. 

I opened a box of my father's personal things the other day, and amongst the 50 or so odd trinkets, my grandfather's WWI medals were there. There is a story there and I only know fragments. Of all of the other items, I know even less. I need to take pictures of these items and I need to find their story. This is my goal right now.

As morbid as this may sound, I have begun planning my end of days and where my final resting place will be. I am torn between testing with my parents versus the place I came from. I am 85% sure you will find me in a Victoria cemetery in a mausoleum where I can be visited by my great-great-great grandchildren hundreds of years from now.

Once a month until that day I will write. Once a month until I can no longer, I will say what I want and I will invite the world into my space. But this is my story for my son. I put my energy into the world. I accept.

Love Dad