June 29: The day before

This is not a fishing related post, except that the accidental death of Alex, my younger son, happened last year, during the fishing season.

I don't know if anyone reading this wants to join us in remembering Alex tomorrow, but that's what this post is about. A friend suggested inviting other people in and I thought that was a kind idea because I know that Scott (his father) and David (his brother) and I are not the only people who lost Alex.

I've posted this in a few places and just want to be sure that anyone who wants to join in has the chance to do it, but there is absolutely no pressure. Just an invitation. Here is what I posted. Please feel free to pass this along to anyone who might be interested.



Tomorrow is the first anniversary of Alex's accidental death in Micronesia. A friend who lost her two children in an airplane crash told me that the death of a child is like carrying a heavy weight that get heavier every year. I didn't understand that until we began to approach this anniversary and suddenly my mind raced ahead to next year's anniversary, 5 years from now and "he would have been 25" "he would have been 30" "he would have graduated college" and so on. I think that's how it gets heavier, because of the tendency to count and store the increasing loss.

I believe that if Alex could have picked anything he would NOT want to be for people who loved him, it would be an increasingly heavy weight. I know I don't want that.

Talking about this upcoming anniversary, a friend suggested that we could invite anyone else who wanted to do something to join us in that something. Scott and I talked about it and about what to do. This is our idea.

We thought of two things - the first one is easy. We will light a candle for him first thing in the morning. I will put mine in the sink and let it burn all day long until I go to bed. I will reflect on the meaning of the light that a candle sheds, the darkness it dispels, its impermanence in the world and permanence in my memory, and whatever else comes up.

The next thing is harder and more complicated. Scott thought of offering something Alex wrote for you to read. I liked that idea. I wanted to go a step further to try to lighten that weight. I thought we might borrow a whole page from Alex's book and live it - and invite you to live it, too. What does that mean?

Alex wrote several drafts of his graduation speech before he died. We put them together and his brother, David, read the result at last year's graduation. It was about having the courage to inhabit your entire life, painful and sweet, good and bad. Now, we've done some more editing and expanded a crucial section with parts of a message he sent to a beloved friend the night before his death. We've also added an introduction and explanation from us. Our idea is to invite you to light the candle, follow this link http://db.tt/nwFr4SGH to the abridged speech (in Dropbox) and then do it. Choose something you don't like about yourself and stay with it. Befriend it, feel it, love yourself including this part of yourself, like you love your child, even when they are being difficult and even the parts you wish were different.

We thought that the weight of losing Alex could become lighter if it reminds us to be more compassionate and loving toward ourselves and if each year, instead of counting how much more of Alex we have lost, we could count how much more of ourselves we have recovered because our memory of him inspired us to have the courage to feel the whole truth of our lives and the strength to love ourselves, anyway.