Last night I attended a late showing of Dustin Hoffman and Susan Sarandon’s movie Moonlight Mile. An audience of young and old sat absorbed and silent as the drama of two parents and their deceased daughter’s ex-fiancé unfolded. Bearing witness to their emotional defenses and behavior as well as the ineffectual and sometimes cruel expressions of sympathy from others was certainly sobering for every member of the audience. I am sure that my husband and I were not the only parents there who had also lost a child, whether unexpectedly as the movie couple had or after an illness.

Suddenly, as the characters acted out of their deepest needs on screen and Susan Sarandon’s character struggled to get back to her writing work, I thought about my launch date for Writing It Real. I had hoped for a September 1 launch, then a mid-September launch. My CTO and programmers worked as fast as they could to get the web design up and functioning, but ultimately relayed to me that I would not be able to post articles until September 30, which meant announcing the magazine to its audience on October 1.

What I realized for the first time while watching the movie was that what had disappointed me for weeks now meant that I would be announcing my magazine on the same day that my son, Seth Bender, came into this world in 1975. I was 27 when I gave birth to him, the same age that he would have been this October 1, if he hadn’t died two winters ago in a snow boarding accident. That’s when the tears came.

My son was the kind of young man who helped me to accomplish what I set out to do. When I was in graduate school writing poems each week for class, he told me he would build me a house on wheels when he grew up so I could write and write while he drove me around. When he was in junior high and fell in love with mountain biking, he coaxed me to brave rocky, branch-strewn trails in the country and closer to home, to bike up city curbs.

It was important to Seth to be useful, effective, and ethical. He had a gift for doing things right. He knew at an early age that the decisions we make in life matter to ourselves and to others. Since he loved nothing more than building and designing habitats, the house on wheels he’d imagined as a boy became a two-bedroom cabin by the water that at 17, he designed for me as a writing retreat.

 As Seth finished college and became a man, all of us noticed that he didn’t waste time. He didn’t “kill time.” He didn’t even “spend time.” He lived in time. Whether he was teaching others to fly kites or cooking venison ravioli from meat a client gave him, my son was in the moment of his joy. “Chill, Mom,” he said to me on more than one occasion. Look at the sky, the water, the sunset, the way a slug moves along the asphalt driveway or the way the hammock rocks in the breeze.

Waiting at Seth’s bedside for the rest of our immediate family to gather and say goodbye, Seth’s dad Jim Bender wrote the elements of what he called “Seth Style” in a notebook. He listed the essence of what we must do now to honor Seth. Seth Style, he wrote, is to play and create, laugh and love. Doing that allows us to find the space between the tears by remembering the balance in Seth’s life, the way he could relax with friends, colleagues, and new acquaintances and bring his skills and perceptions to others, whether through a design, hands-on help hanging wall board, or greeting his neighbors each day with true fondness.

Once when I visited Seth at his college in Boulder, CO, we hiked in the Rocky Mountain National Park, listening to the aspen leaves clapping in the breeze. Aspens, my son told me then, are the largest known organisms in the world because the whole stand is one tree. Today, out of loss and the grieving that comes with it, I know that everyone on this planet, the planet itself, and the universe in which it exists are one, like the aspen. I understand how, as I am so sure that Seth could tell me, happiness and sorrow, joy and grief, having and letting go are also of that tree, that magnificent tree, the magnificent tree of life,

That day in the Rockies, as Seth and I sat down to eat the goat cheese and sour dough bread we’d packed for lunch, he told me the philosophy he worked out with a friend when they biked nearby Eldorado Canyon. Life, he said to me at age 19, is all about “food” and “stuff.” The amount of food and stuff you need to appreciate your life and live well is not all that big, if you choose the right stuff and the right food.

Seth’s choice was to become the kind of architect who cared about the needs of people. He was instrumental in building a bus stop for migrant farm workers in California’s Central Valley when along with graduate student peers, he found that these workers waited for buses to take them to and from work and spent great lengths of time standing by the road in harsh sunlight. When a client who offered therapy in her home wanted an addition to house her office, Seth showed her how she could maximize filtered light in her new workspace rather than invite a glare.

I know that for me and those whom I teach, taking time to write from personal experience provides both the right food and the right stuff for finding what it is that lights our souls and what it is we offer others. As Linda Trichter says in Writing the Mind Alive, which she co-authored with her partner Tobin Simon:

Imagine discovering what it’s like to be you, how it feels to be in your skin, to think your thoughts, to possess your memories, to be shaped by your stories, to be driven by your obsessions, to be happy or unhappy as only you are, to perceive yourself and others as only you do. Self-trust begins with an honest exploration of your thoughts and feelings, which are as close to you as the food you eat and the air you breathe.

Writing from personal experience, we live with and in the flow of time, and access what many call the power of now. When we write, we find that now is a rich and fertile place that helps us cull information about experience through our five senses and promotes the feeling of being most alive.

On this October 1, which is the second birthday upon which I give presents to Seth in new ways now that he is gone, I launch Writing It Real. It is my gift to the young man who loved everything about having a poet and writer as a mom except the loud sound of her Olivetti electric typewriter as he was falling asleep. It is the gift I am bringing into the world, announcing it just as I announced his birth on this day 27 years ago. Writing It Real, created on a quiet Macintosh computer, which would not have disturbed Seth, is dedicated to helping others “bike up curbs” and find “the right food and the right stuff” for living the meaning that connects us to one another, to the habitats in which we live, and to the planet that hosts all of us.