A Birthday Letter Beyond: To Shilo, with Love
Shi,
Today marks what would have been your 50th birthday, a day that now carries both sweet memories and a silent echo of your absence. It's going to be a rough few weeks. On this day last year, you were unwrapping what would be my last gift to you: a special, oversized hardcover edition of Neil Gaimon’s Sandman series. You had gotten the others in the omnibus at the library and torn through them voraciously, but they didn’t have the last volume. So I drove down to Fort Collins and found an edition that included the volume you had yet to read (again.)
Your eyes sparked as you pulled the book out of the gift bag, and you flashed that trickster half-smile that hooked me the moment I first saw you on that Colorado dance floor. almost thirty years ago
So, it’s almost been a year now since the girls and I have had to learn how to live without you. And I just wanted to drop a note into the energetic interwebs of existence, trusting that, in some way, we are still entangled in some minute quantum process. In the hopes that somehow, wherever your sentient conscious self may be, some of this might get through.
It’s been a hard journey without you. But it feels as though the elder gods have taken the helm of my soul's ship, guiding me through turbulent waters toward something greater. While I'm grateful for the direction and the promise of new horizons, the bitterness lingers that I must navigate this voyage without you by my side.
I am getting better being alone. You, more than anyone, knew just how hard it was for me to sit alone on the couch of my life with my inner demons. But we’ve all become friends in a fashion: my demons and me. In these quiet debates, I've found strength I never knew I had—strength I credit to years by your side. I try my best to keep the trauma loops at bay, writing furiously until the visions subside. It’s been getting easier as time flows on.
You’ll be happy to know that my writing is really beginning to gain some traction. I am finishing up my third fiction title and am moving forward with my agent on my second nonfiction title. My speaking gigs are really taking off, and I am beginning to do some work with universities and even a national museum. I have worked it out, so they have to bring Wintyr or Lux out when I go to these so that they can experience more of life across the country.
I just wanted to tell you how much I miss you, how much we all miss you. And we are all thinking of you as we head into this hard season. First, your birthday, followed quickly by our anniversary, followed again by Mother’s Day, the night you left us.
I hope beyond all that you are out on crazy, mystical adventures now in a body that is healthy and without having to endure pain every moment of your existence. Your little black cat, Jasper, whom Lux was so proud to give you as a gift, is huge now. I am pretty sure that he helped usher you through to the other side, as he disappeared the night you left and was nowhere to be seen for three days. And considering he is deathly afraid of leaving the confines of the house, I can only assume he was helping you navigate the first stretch of that new journey that someday we will all have to make. Maybe he will help me find you when it is my time.
I don’t know how this crazy universe (multiverse) of ours works, but I have to believe that our souls have become entangled, as I mentioned before, through the act of living and loving and raising a family together in this lifetime, that we will see each other again.
Until then, I’ll keep speaking quietly to you in my small moments alone and in letters to the infinite like this one.
Happy un-birthday, my love. In this life and beyond, I carry you with me—always in my heart, forever in our shared whispers of the soul.
Love,
J