Losing The Future

Dear Rachel,

Today is your birthday. You would have been 25 years old. You should have been 25 years old, a recent college graduate, just starting out. (That “would have been” really hurts. I have a real problem dealing with tenses these days.)

This is the time when you should have been jumping into your career, eager to get going with your life, ready to take on the world. This is – or would have been – the point in your life when you finally start to see some rewards for all that hard work you put in at school, when you’d be able to look at the world with stars in your eyes and an endlessly optimistic vision for your future. Who knows, perhaps you would have changed the world.

You did change my world, of course. And Lesley’s and Debbie’s and Amy’s and . . . well, countless other people’s. And always for the better.

The grief counselors point out that when one loses a parent, we grieve because we have, in effect, lost the past. When we lose a spouse, we grieve for the loss of the present. But when we lose a child, we grieve because we've lost the future. And that's the most painful loss of all.

I miss you. I miss you every day, of course, but even more today.

Love,

Dad