My Love Letters - They Must Be Written

My Love Letters
They Must Be Written

There I was at the Harvest Room Restaurant discussing not the world's problems but my personal problems with a former student of mine, Chris. Chris is a thinker. Therefore, it seemed apropos to discuss my personal issues with a Rodin-esque thinker. Most of my issues in life have to do with the two dances with death that I have done and my attendance at a protest rally in Myanmar.

Those three events have been transformative for me. Transformative comes from the Latin word transformatus, which is the past participle of transformare. My use of the etymology of transformative is to express to you the radical change or my metamorphosis within me since those three events occurred.

However, hauntings accompany my transformations. While the two dances and the protest rally in Yangon, Myanmar were positive events, I still question and wonder...hence my hauntings.

Chris knows all about my three life-changing events. Therefore, I needed an informed outsider to force me to address things that I didn't fully understand in spite of life-changing occurrences. Thus began our breakfast devoted to dealing with my issues.

I prefaced my mental quandary by restating parts of Randy Pausch's Last Lecture. Pausch taught me that my dancing with death caused me to live even though I had thought that I was already alive. That being said, one of my hauntings has to do with Jack and Owen, who are 6 and 4. When I was around 4, both my grandfathers died. I have two pictures of them playing with me but no memories. While my plan is to outlive George Burns, which means another 26+ years, I have twice danced with death. Those were sobering events especially in reference to Jack and Owen. My three children and adult granddaughter have loads of memories of me stretching over two to four decades. I hope that I can add to them, but the hauntings have to do with the memories that Jack and Owen have of me. That haunts me. Trust me.

Next, I mentioned wanting to talk with someone on a regular basis about things like I do with him and a couple other guys. Chris knew that I meant a female around my age, but, to make his point clearly, he said, "You might want to talk with a psychotherapist."

Then my thinking friend said, "You seem to need to write love letters." Then he went on about my love for Jack and Owen. He understands that strange bonding that has occurred with them and me. Their relationship is different. A part of it is my doing the two dances. I get that. In addition, I think that I am grieving over the deaths of my grandfathers nearly seven decades ago.

Then we got into Randy Pausch and his Last Lecture. As much as that Last Lecture changed me and millions of others, at the end of that transformative lecture, Pausch adds as a postscript that he was giving his Last Lecture not to his audience at Carnegie Mellon but to his children who won't remember him after he dies, which occurred less than a year later.

Then Chris said that I needed to write a book of my love letters to Jack and Owen and my family. While I mull over his haunting statement about a book, I thought about a book that I have already written but haven't published. I wrote about conversations that I had with objects in an antique shop. Even though I have given up on the book, my writing has morphed into talking with objects around my home. Additionally, I will continue to write about my granddaughter, Ayanna, and especially my grandsons, Jack and Owen as I ponder a book of love letters.

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