Father, Mother,
I miss you.
I truly do.
It has been over forty years since you left,
and more than twenty since you followed.
Today, I miss you especially.
If I could meet you now—
if meeting you were still possible—
there is something I would like to ask.
To the two of you,
who by any worldly measure lived the lives of failures:
What does it mean to live?
How does one live, in a way that can truly be called living?
And how did you endure
the crushing weight of a life
that must have tightened around your breath
and pressed down upon your spirit?
From you—
from you who walked the bitter road of failure—
I wish to receive even a fragment
of wisdom that surpasses despair.
Laughing and crying,
writhing in pain,
at times hollow, at times full,
looking up at the sky, looking down at the earth,
experiencing ascent and descent—
flight and fall.
Somehow,
rather than from those
who race along the brilliant boulevard of success,
I feel I might gain
a clearer insight into how life is transcended from you,
who spent an entire season in tears and sighs.
And because I am your son,
you would surely have much to say to me.
Father, who shared only twenty years
of a sixty-year life with me;
Mother, who for seventy years
spent more days apart from me
than together—
To you both,
your son, now nearing sixty himself,
asks about the meaning of life.
And I long to see you.
By the way—
are you at peace there?