the caveat

Dear much much younger me,

Hey, it's much older me with few stories about the life ahead of you. It may not be all that helpful but maybe you can savor some of the good parts and not let them slip by unnoticed.

We're going to travel a very long way and skip over a ton of detail but when we're done I'll bring you right back where we began with perspective and appreciation you may have overlooked if not for the heads up. Fasten your seatbelt.

Before you were even born your mom will have been told that, "you will love this one more.." Before you ever experience joy or pain, loss or sorrow, you will be loved by this beautiful woman who will become the very life inside of you forever. This letter will hopefully serve as a reminder of what is really important to your life and help you to understand a lot of things you may have questions about and never seem to find answers for.

You are going to hope and dream about things that will seem out of reach for you. You are going to experience joy and excitement of loving and being loved back in return. There will be sadness and fear along with despair and pain and darkness where no light has ever been seen. There will be times in your life that you cannot believe how well you have done and how far you took success that no one except your mom ever thought you could achieve. There will also be years where deep and dark depression will overcome you and try to take your life. All of these things are ahead of you in no particular order but remember I will eventually bring you back right here where it all began.

In the span of just one lifetime, you are going to experience the most gracious unconditional love a human being on this earth has ever known. There will also be times when loss and sadness will fill your soul and create an empty chasm where your heart once lived in one piece. Do not be afraid, this is life and I will bring you back.

The unconditional love from your mother who will love you more than her own life, you will not fully comprehend until you are an old man filled with loss and sorrow. In the very end, you will have wasted so much time hoping and dreaming of things you will attain that will become completely useless to what life is really all about.

You will be sick and near death needing a kidney removed and you will survive that ordeal and be alright. The isolation from the kids who live across the street who never invited you in and leave you to play by yourself and learn how to be alone, this too shall pass and give you a lesson you will need much later in life. These early days of growing up will have you playing with your first friend a dog named Blackie on the front porch all by yourself and tossing a football up in the air to run under it and pretend to catch an incredible touchdown pass while listening to the school band playing down the street where all the lights are on Friday nights. The sadness you will feel over having to play by yourself while the neighborhood kids play across the street, those hard times you won't fully understand until one day those issues will seem like some of the best days of your life..

You will fight constantly with one of your sisters and eat brown sugar sandwiches and feel unbearable anxiety over changing schools when we move. Meeting new people and change will become your Achilles heel and when you finally find that thing you're really good at, that thing will be tennis! It will take the edge off all the awkwardness and you will play for the school team and you will lose your first human friend who thought he would be the one playing for the school. Being picked for the school tournaments will make your mom so proud but what she won't know is the behind the scenes jealousy and losing your only friend over it. Those will be tough days and great days and when you get very much older from now you will give anything to be able to trade your today and go back in time from the old man and circumstances you will find yourself in, to the young man you are growing into with those relatively minor issues in tow.

You will quit school long before you graduate and get married and have a son only to have that little family you create be blown to pieces probably by not having ever seen or experienced what it means to be a father, husband, friend or family man. The meddling of an old friend's wife in this already difficult situation will leave the girl you married feeling like she has no other choice but to file for divorce before either of you realize what marriage is about. You are 17 to 21 now and running your own Music store and creating a name for yourself in the business as a no-nonsense business-building success. But at home, you will be a confused and inexperienced kid who never had a father to show you how to be one. A kid who somehow has an innate ability to sustain and grow a business, but at home, you won't know how to function on any level. The toll that loss of your little family will have on you will destroy the fabric inside your soul that is needed later in life for becoming a confident, well-adjusted adult with a positive outlook and a determination to carry on and find happiness with a new beginning.

You will struggle for many years and come very close to ending it all before your time. Life will take many turns and go through unforgiving valleys that you yourself will be responsible for despite efforts by a mother who will suffer alongside you trying to love the problems away to no avail because you won't be ready.

Finally, you will find yourself in a place where you actually make a good decision for the rest of your life. You will decide that you are not willing to die on the living room floor in your apartment all alone where the mother who gave birth to you and loved you through all of the times you didn't deserve it might find you laying there dead. You are going to wake up the next morning which will be a miracle in itself and be unwilling to continue causing problems for yourself and those who love you and you will very simply stop the nonsense and self-destructive behavior you have been drowning yourself in and grow up. It will be long past time to listen to and care about a woman who would have given her life for yours at any moment and you will take away her greatest fears put there by you, and replace them with pride. Oh, my much younger self why would you have taken so long...

You will have several more decades after the troubled times where life seems to work out better spending time thinking of the things you want to accomplish instead of the next destructive habit. Setting goals and reaching them will replace destroying opportunities and living selfishly minute by minute. You will not re-marry or have any more children and that will be a part of your plan to become what you think you want to be which is financially independent, able to go and do and work for yourself and more importantly, be capable of taking care of your mom who will be getting older and needing your help.

No more will you be competing for jobs and trying to keep up, you are going to make it and do well and no one will be more surprised at your level of success than you, and no one will be more proud than your mom who stuck by you even while you were screwing up your life. You will begin to realize had you lived the life your mom always wanted for you, half of this letter would not be as embarrassing as it reads. 


The caveat. 

One day when you have worked for and achieved everything you ever dreamed of and more, your best and only true friend, your mentor, your heart and the embodiment of your soul and reason for life itself, will begin to get old and become frail very quickly. The realization of what that will all mean will come to you abruptly despite your attempts to ignore it and you will not be ready. You will have learned by this time that your beautiful loving mom was always the only human being on this earth who never once left your side and now it will be you who will never leave hers. You will become her primary caregiver doing things she can no longer do for herself and your roles will now reverse and you will become the one caring for her every need the rest of her life.

It's going to be hard and heartwarming at the same time. Your fears and worry will reach levels you will think are going to have your heart explode inside your chest and end your life. You will not completely understand what the doctors are telling you and think you will find answers and you will fix this. It's what you do you fix things. You will fail and keep trying. Things will get worse and you will try something new. Your mind in self-defense mode will refuse to wrap itself around what is actually happening but your mom will know and she will tell you and try to prepare you and you won't have any of it. You will begin to feel a depths of loneliness and despair that will be nothing like any of your younger life. Tears will flow at times uncontrollably and you will feel as if you might drown in them. The idea that your life may be passing in front of your own eyes through your mom will be shoved aside because there will be much to do and no time to feel sorry for yourself. That will come later when you're old and alone typing on a machine amongst all the memories that pound you in the chest where your heart used to be. You will reach out for help and be angrily surprised and shocked even, at the limitations of some you expected would be there one hundred percent but then an angel will appear at the door from what may seem an unlikely source and the caring for your mom will get more intense as she gets weaker by the day but you will no longer be on your own in the fight for the life of the greatest gift God has ever given to one who most likely never deserved it.   

One night at home after a lot of suffering and trips in and out of the hospital, one night your heart and your soul is going to take her last breath in your hands and God is going to reach down and take her out of your arms and into his and you will never again see or hear her sweet loving voice on this earth ever again. Your life will be forever changed. Everything you have ever felt throughout your entire memory of being alive is going to seem foreign like it was someone else's life, the pain and despair then now will seem insignificant and small by comparison.

Bringing you back where we began. 

People well-meaning as they are will offer you advice on how long it will take to feel anything again. Many will offer what they can and some will disappear completely. You are going to revert back to these younger days when you were left to do your own suffering alone like when you were on the porch by yourself watching the neighborhood kids playing across the street or losing your human friend to jealousy over a game and when your little family decided you were no longer needed as a part of theirs. You will begin to venture out only when it feels safe to do so and in your own time like when no one was around to watch you throw the football to yourself in the front yard.

When you are too old to start over, life is going to punch you in the mouth and it will seem as though you're right back where you began as a little kid alone and afraid and unsure of everything. You will cry out for your mother like you probably do now as a little boy only this time you will be very old and pathetic looking while you do it and there will be someone missing. That someone to console you and make you think it will all be OK in time, someone you could always count on and lean on will not be there for you to talk to and to hold onto.

Many years from now after all this life has gone by and your dreams and hopes have been realized and your mom has left and gone to heaven to be with Gran and Grandad and Dub, Toots and Peggy and the rest of your family, you are going to spend a lot of time sitting very quietly in a room by yourself surrounded by the reminders of all that was before and will never be again. All there will be left for you to do is to type out your feelings on a little machine to virtually no one. At this point in your life, you will have reached a lot of goals that will mean almost nothing in the end. Those things will not stop your regrets at not having lived a better life if not for yourself, for your mom for longer than you did. None of what you will have will seem important just sitting there without anyone special to share them with or be proud of you for. You will essentially be a walking reflection of who you were as a little boy when everything good was put in front of you by a mom who loved you more than herself and more than life. By the time this is realized you will no longer be that little boy you are today who has a solid foundation to lean on. You will be completely alone and facing the same fears many older people do who have no one to help them in times of need.

Conclusion before it's too late?

Enjoy your life, Mikey, while you have it my much younger self. Go on across the street and play with the other kids and get in trouble for it if you have to. Go to the football games down the street and make a friend you can throw the football to instead of throwing it to yourself. Don't spend a lot of time hoping and dreaming of things you may not have when all you ever need in your life is sitting right there next to you. You don't want to end up with everything you ever wanted and be old and left sitting alone pouring out your life on a little machine to yourself. Live life don't just dream about it. Be good instead of striving just to feel good. Listen to those few who show love for you instead of the many who will say they do.

Finally, honor your mom and continue to make her proud. When you lose her and get old, do not grieve inconsolably for the rest of your days. Find a way to live again. She will want that for you.

So long my younger self-