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Letter to My Son

Sheila Bender's Writing It Real Posted on by

Writing It Real members and students know my love of the epistolary (letter) form in literature and the many examples of it I offer as writing models. During the holiday season, a time of letters from those near and far, I am especially inspired to write to my son, Seth. At the letter’s end, I have included links to poems and prose in letter form you might like to read for more models in this genre.

December 27, 2014

Dear Seth,

Where you are, do you still count in days and months and years? Here, it’s coming up on the end of another year without you, the 14th since the late afternoon call from a hospital chaplain in Denver, of our flights, your father’s, your sister’s, your brother-in-law’s, your step-dad Kurt’s and mine to get to your bedside, where you were surrounded by your fiancée Kristen and her family, of the moment between Christmas and New Year’s when everything altered, one icy Breckenridge slope, one tree, then no longer a holiday time, but a time for us to learn how to say goodbye.

Your grandmother says that often at night, she has a vision of you and your grandfather and great aunt, who both died not long after you, sitting on a ledge above her talking. When I ask what you are you saying to one another, she says she doesn’t know. She just sees the three of you.

Why on a ledge, I wonder.

The word sticks with me, and I look it up today, the anniversary of your death, in the Merriam-Webster online dictionary and in the Fine Dictionary. This would not surprise you, since you know I am a believer that words hold wisdom in their definitions and etymologies. It wouldn’t surprise you, either, that I can’t stop myself from searching and go to Dictionary.com and to the Online Etymology Dictionary.

What the Merriam Webster tells me:

1: a raised or projecting edge or molding intended to protect or check <a window ledge>

2: an underwater ridge or reef especially near the shore

3a: a narrow flat surface or shelf; especially:  one that projects from a wall of rock

3b: rock that is solid or continuous enough to form ledges: bedrock <the field was full of ledge>

I look out the large windows of our house, my laptop on the dining room table. The fir wood you helped us decide to use for sills has darkened now with age into a honey red-orange color. I focus, too, on the south wall of the house’s exterior, see the window ledges outside, which remain painted the same dark barn red as when the house was first built. When it was time to repaint, Kurt and I couldn’t part with a detail of what we had chosen together with you, who designed this house even before you started college and were formally on your way to becoming an architect.

I think about the quiet distinction between the barn-red ledges and the natural cedar shingles of the house’s exterior. The grey weathering of the shingles over the last years is gone now since we had them power washed and their bright woodsy color is restored. I know, I know, come spring and dry weather, we must have them sealed. I know, yes, we cannot do the power washing too many times without risking the strength of the shingles. I heed the caution I imagine in your voice letting me know, as always, what I must be sure to take care of. This morning, though, the windows just chorus: we are here; this is where anyone can see in, where you inhabitants see out, where, I feel certain, only something thin as a windowpane separates your world and mine.

I sit with my laptop on our dining room and look out over the bay you loved to explore in the wooden kayak you built. I remember when Kurt and I sat with a visiting cousin on a ledge of beached driftwood as you pulled the beautiful boat up and urged the rest of us to take her out for a paddle. Looking at the water, I remember the day Kristen paddled out in that boat to release your ashes, and I remember, too, the story of your marriage proposal to her — on your dad’s boat docked for the night on the other side of Port Townsend where the two of you had sailed from Seattle. Your grandmother kept secret that you had asked her for the ring she promised you, your great grandmother’s ring, to slip onto Kristen’s finger. And you were ready for that other journey, for the children you would have together, ready to teach them to love the woods and the water.

I sit at the dining room table, thinking how each year since you left has been a ledge for me on grief’s rock wall. Each year, I find handholds and footholds that allow me to climb toward the brightness we shared. Your sister’s growing sons, now 9 and 12 (who sleep when they are here on a trundle bed in the room you designed as my study), Kristen’s new life with a husband and two children now, a decade of caring for your grandmother, who turns 88 next month, helped me learn that sorrow doesn’t have to be an unending pall, but a source instead of deeply loving.

I sit at the dining room table looking out of the windows, watching the bay and think of how your ashes were the unconsolidated material of your life. But your spirit, the eternal — that is of the bedrock I hold inside of me, even more strongly since you left.

Kurt has kept a dynamic photograph of you on his office wall for years now. You are in Central California, pouring over blueprints laid out on the ground. You are talking with your project partners about the next step in building a covered bus shelter for field hands who labored all day under hot sun and then waited in the same hot sun for their bus home.

I think of the bedrock beneath those fields, of the soil in those fields, of the produce growing there. I think of the way your kindness is in the asparagus I will steam for dinner tonight, in the cabbage from which I made a healing soup for your stepdad Kurt in the days since a recent surgery, in the seeds I will plant again this spring in our ever expanding vegetable garden.

I return now to Internet sites on etymology. For ledge, the list, to me, is musical:

  1. n ledge A shelf on which articles may be placed; anything which resembles such a shelf; a flat rim or projection; as, the ledge of a window; a ledge of earth on the inner side of a parapet.
  2. n ledge Specifically— In arch.: A small horizontal molding of rectangular profile. A string-course.
  3. n ledge In joinery, a piece against which something rests, as the side of a rebate against which a door or shutter is stopped, or a projecting fillet serving the same purpose as the stop of a door, or the fillet which confines a window-frame in its place.
  4. n ledge In ship-building, a. piece of the deck-frame of a ship, lying between the deck-beams.
  5. n ledge A rail of a chair.
  6. n ledge In printing, one of the pieces of furniture; a wedge, used in locking up a form of type.
  7. n ledge A shelf-like ridge or elevation; any natural formation somewhat resembling a shelf: as, a ledge at the top of a precipice; a ledge of rock under water. In mining, ledge is a common name in the Cordilleran region for the lode, or for any outcrop supposed to be that of a mineral deposit or vein. It is frequently used, as reef is in Australia, to designate a quartz-vein.
  8. n ledge A bar for fastening a gate.

Your life was one of designing and building and boating; mine is one of sitting in a chair, its legs I have learned, supported by a ledge, writing my way to the veins of my subjects. How much the essence of our lives is contained in this word ledge.

And then I read more of the etymology:

To lay hands on

To lay eggs

To allege

I, who would lay my hands on your shoulders, wrap my arms around you for a hug, wave hello to you as often as I could, and knew that you were always hatching a new adventure, a new building plan, look up “allege” and find a definition I wasn’t aware of: “To alleviate; to lighten, as a burden or a trouble.”

As the year turns and the 15th we must go on without you here begins, I sit with my laptop on the dining room table typing this letter to you, wondering what you are saying in your grandmother’s vision.

Of course, I would love for you to write soon. In a dream or a vision of my own. Speak to me; there is treasure in words.

With love always,

Mom

****

Here is a list of some letter poems that have been my guides in writing in the epistolary form:

Richard Hugo’s “Letter to Simic” and “Letter to Kathy” in his collection 31 Letters and 13 Dreams capture my heart whenever I read them as do most of the poems in this collection.

Ted Kooser’s “A Letter in October.”

Dana Gioia’s “The Letter.”

And here is a list of a literary prose in letter form that draw me back again and again:

Shortly after his inauguration, Barak Obama published this open
letter to his daughters in Parade Magazine.

Psychologist Dr. Brad Sachs published a book of letters written to a
teenage girl who tried to commit suicide and whose parents were
in therapy with him, too. When No One Understands: Letters 
to a Teenager on Life, Loss, and the Hard Road to Adulthood full of necessary, honest advice. Here’s an excerpt.

Cheryl Strayed’s book Tiny Beautiful Things, a compilation of the letters she wrote when she was an anonymous “Dear Sugar” columnist for The Rumpus.

Comments

Letter to My Son — 18 Comments

  1. Good Morning Sheila,
    Your letter to Seth struck a resonating note for me. You taught me about journaling. I had no idea that writing letters to Rob would be so necessary for my sanity after his death. Those first three years were filled with sleepless nights as thoughts and memories whirled around my mind. I began writing letters to our twenty-three year old. Each day, I filed them in a special folder marked ROB. Each time I wrote a letter to him, some of my midnight mind-whirling was transferred to paper and into his folder. Gradually, after a year or so, I found that I was sleeping longer with less whirling of awake time.
    Shortly after Seth’s passing, you drifted into Tucson. You were to present to our Society of Southwestern Authors Wrangling With Writing Workshop. You and I had coffee in an empty hotel restaurant. We “drifted” for about thirty minutes.
    “Drifted” fits because you were where I was three years earlier. Your face was expressionless, almost lifeless. You had that look of a person who had recently lost a child. I told you that you were “running on battery”. We talked of Seth and Rob knowing each other in their Spirit world. I told you about my letters to Rob and how I survived. Maybe participating in the workshop was your way of survival. Whatever it was, we connected. We began writing to each other. The result was two volumes of This Might Help by Phyllis and me. And still later you published A New Theology. We are both comfortable living with the spirits of our children. And now your letter to Seth…striking chimes of memories.
    DING!

    • Thank you, Sam, for your words. I know that I was eager to spend time with you that weekend in Tucson as you had shared the story of Rob’s death with me and I admired your writing. I didn’t know that our writing to one another sparked your wonderful, helpful book This Might Help, written from the many columns you and Phyllis wrote for the Tucson chapter of Compassioate Friends. My, how writing sparks the deepest friendships and the lastingly inspiring of them. I could not have thrived and grown without writing, without those who believe in and practice its powers. Another thank you, for the years of writing and feeling and compassionate companionship.

  2. Sheila,

    I’ve been carrying around your letter to Seth since the morning I read it. Thinking about the experience of each year since his death, a ledge where footholds and handholds help you find the brightness you shared was a wonderful metaphor. I found myself returning to the early years after my brother’s death, the intensity of the loss and I could easily remember long periods of balancing on my own “ledge.” And then to follow in your writing, you, finding your way through the etymology to “allege,” to lighten the burden, was moving.

    Thank you!

    • Thank you for leaving this comment, Mary. All of us who suffer the loss of loved ones, know how difficult, surprising, and always with us that loss is. You have pointed out what I believe so true about writing–metaphor is at the heart of it and helps us so much more than we can realize even as we write. When an image or term won’t leave us alone, it needs to be written from; it has energy for us.

  3. Yet another note from me, to admire the exchange of expression on the letter to Seth.

    All the responses, from such dear people and fine writers, are beautifully and thoughtfully written; I have read each more than once and find that they teach me, too.

    And, Sheila, how wonderful that you take the time to respond to each
    individually. I send praise for what you have created with WIR and how you encourage and bring many of us buds to bloom.

    Thank you for the November/December on line poetry class, which you led so masterfully. With deep appreciation and warmth from this bud in your garden.

    • I am blushing, Nancy. I do appreciate your thanks and description of what happens at Writing It Real. I too have loved the writing in these comments. When we speak from the heart and speak with care and attention to our words, we create such beauty! Thank you for taking the time to focus us on this.

  4. Thank you for being so open and honest with your feelings, a true gift. As others have said, I can’t imagine what it must be like to lose a child, but you have handled this with grace and courage and continue to support and encourage the writers around you to explore their worlds with equal amounts of honesty and courage.

    • Thank you for your words, Morgan. I do advocate being open and honest in our writing. How do we connect to one another otherwise? How do we live richly and deeply unless we address the dark emotions? Where do we have an opportunity to do this? Certainly in our writing. It is not easy to come at truth slant as Emily Dickinson advocated in her famous poem. It is important, though, because it helps us find more than we knew we could say. Here, I used exploration of a word’s meaning as a strategy to do this, a word that stayed with me because of my mother’s report of her vision. Our connections to others, our listening to them, often spark our writing.

  5. Dear Shelia:
    I have been away this holiday visiting our children and their families, and so I have just now gotten to emails. I have often said to my wife that I could never survive the loss of a child, and having read your letter to your son I sense that the only way one might try to survive such a terrible loss would be to face it and one’s own grief head on. And obviously you have used writing as a way to, not just survive such an impossible loss, but cope with it by keeping Seth alive in the words you create. That is both courageous and beautiful, and I commend you for your courage and your depth of feeling. The latter is dangerous, isn’t it, but must be recognized as ironically, if not tragically, part of being human.
    Peace,
    Michael

    • Hi Michael,
      Your comment so well articulates what we find important in writing, what sometimes we shy away from and sometimes are even trained to shy away from thinking: that revealing our depth of feeling is a no no, and puts us among those who “study their navels,” to use the old cliche describing self-absorbed people.

      Your words remind of some I’ve been reading recently. You wrote, “That is both courageous and beautiful, and I commend you for your courage and your depth of feeling. The latter is dangerous, isn’t it, but must be recognized as ironically, if not tragically, part of being human.”

      In her book, The Journal Keeper, A Memoir,” Phyllis Theroux quotes Lawrence McCafferty, “What keeps you from being fully alive is what you are most afraid to go through.” I think that is true in our writing. What keeps us from writing what we most need to be fully alive is what we are afraid of reliving as we write.

      Yes, dangerous. Yes important. In my case, I know that Seth would want nothing less than for me to live fully as he did.

      Thank you for your comment. It means a lot to me.

    • Loss of anyone, of any age, brings us face to face with our own limits. Sheila has long since decided what we all must decide: to fully live the gift we have as long as we have it. To mourn and move on, bringing our lost loves with us, keeping them real as part of our own continuum.

  6. Oh, Sheila, my heart forgot to beat as I read through your moving,
    loving, beautiful as a sunrise and, sadly as a sunset, letter to Seth.
    This is a write that truly shows how words can help to soothe one’s loss and sorrow.

    It’s easy for a beginning writer, or one who writes seldom, to
    become maudlin, and you express your feelings so uniquely. Finding a single word — ledge — and what you create from that is remarkable and teaches me a great lesson of a writing path that can be taken. A single word.

    And then there is the weaving and paralleling (if that’s not a word, I’m
    making it so) Seth’s path towards architecture and your working on the house with Kurt. How elegantly done!

    My heart (breathing again) and I send thanks and deep caring,
    Nancy

    • Nancy, I appreciate your writer’s eye on the strategy I used (or better fell into as I examined the vision my mother talks about). I always hope that Writing It Real members will see (and use for themselves) the stategies I share.

      I believe that when we move others, we are writing it real, but to do that, we must reach beyond the sorrow and pain to the mystery words help us explore.

      Lofty goal, but so possible when we stay particular. And then the writing does heal.

  8. Barbie,

    Thank you for this lovely, lyric writing and for the beautiful way you have connected with me, with Seth, with your own spirit and with any who read these words.

    I am in love with these words of yours, particularly, “Seth, through your words, lives and breathes just as sure as you draw breath. I breathe him in as you breathe him out, knowing that in some way we can’t fathom, that life is a continuum we can come and go in, where, somehow, we are the essence of each other, available when we want it.”

    I hope we will sit at our dining room tables many times this coming year and write our hearts to find our knowing.

    Your words warm me,
    Sheila

  9. i sit at the dining room table with my morning cuppa, cleaning out my email, to find your mother’s heart within it, writing to your son, who lives now just a touch away, but as present as the water you watch out your thin pane window. Across the years I have known you, I have come to know him as he lives in you. Seth, through your words, lives and breathes just as sure as you draw breath. I breathe him in as you breathe him out, knowing that in some way we can’t fathom, that life is a continuum we can come and go in, where, somehow, we are the essence of each other, available when we want it.

    I sit at the dining room table, wondering if this is a divine gift we don’t identify as such. Though it comes too soon for some, nevertheless, it comes. I think of what your boy might have contributed here had he stayed with us for awhile. In some way, all of us suffer your loss. My bones tell me Seth functions in another place, as Seth, doing what he is designed to do there, just not here. Just as I know that someday, however eternity is constructed, every one of us who have experienced him in your memories, will know him on sight. Warms me to think of it.

    • Dear Sheila
      I have been reading this heart felt images of words in your letter to Seth, your long lost son. As a mother I could feel the same way as my tear filled eyes try to focus on those words. Thank you for this beautiful letter and also posting etymology of ledges. With warm regards.
      Jamuna

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