Letters 2022

Letter 72

20-09-2022 (Autumn on the way)

Dear D,

I say a prayer to you and about you every day.  Part of the prayer is the hope that you will find your way back to a relationship with me, without hurt or pain to anyone, just naturally, no drama, no tears, no anger, no emotion, that we can see each other as we are now, older than last time, thirteen years if you count, you now 25, in the prime of your life, me 76, gosh am I that old?, yet we are the same people as before, maybe chastened by life’s experiences.  Of course, I would love to know how you progressed in your life.  I imagine you successfully negotiated upper school, university, relationships, employment, and everything in between, but the canvas of your life is completely blank for me, without giving any clue as to your journey during those years we have been apart. Is it right that I should wonder how you got on in your journey through your teenage years and up to now?  You may think about that sometime.  You may have conflicting views, in one direction, wishing to banish me totally from your memory, or in the other, just wondering how life has treated me.  As I have left clues for you to easily locate me, on balance I feel you do not wish to know how I am.   Or it could be, as I might believe, that your thoughts and feelings of me are locked in your memory, waiting to slowly drift out, unexpectedly, by some event or prompt.  There is nothing I can do to awaken that memory.  Maybe nothing you can do by yourself either.  You have not left any clues as to where you are, in fact, you seem to have done the exact opposite, to hide yourself from any connection with me or mine; the experiences of half of your forebears discarded. Can I mention love?  The love of many people would have for you and the love of places and experiences that are there for you, abandoned.  It’s unfair to ask why would you want to forsake all that is yours. That is your decision, and only yours and I have always respected your feelings.  Can you imagine that I love you, as much I did every day I spent with you, up to that day over twelve years ago; and I will love you every day until I die. Only I know that now.  I pray that I will have the opportunity to tell you some day in the future or at least that you will read these words and know of my feelings. I loved my parents when they were alive, rarely expressed in words in those days and now, over thirty years since they died, I can feel my love for them more than I would ever have known.  That was the legacy they left me.  And I want to leave the same legacy to you, of my continuous and constant love for you. If I never see you again, I will love you and if I do see you again, I will love you, it is constant, unchanging.  It is not altered in any way by any feelings of anxiety I may have had about our relationship; any thoughts I may have had that it must have been something I did that caused you to leave me.  Those feelings belong to others perhaps.  I know my feelings of love for you have never changed.

As it always seems to happen in my letters to you, I ramble on with my random thoughts about you; and once again, I have left it too long again to put my thoughts to paper to you. I often have something in mind to communicate with you, but don’t manage to develop that theme sufficiently to actually start a letter. I had two things floating around in my thoughts about recently, totally unrelated.  One was the ‘cancel relationship’ culture supposedly popular in modern times and the other was a section in Proverbs in a recent reading I had come across.  I’ve not managed to do justice to either so I will end with a section of Proverbs 2, as inspiration and encouragement for you:

‘That you will understand what is right and just

And fair – every good path.

For wisdom will enter your heart,

and knowledge will be pleasant to your soul.

Discretion will protect you, 

and understanding will guard you.’

With all my love for now,

Dad xxx