Dear Charlie-
When you and I started this blog, it was to introduce you to the world, and to introduce the world to you – this wonderful, beautiful, unbelievable living thing that arrived in your mom and my life in the last minutes of May 5, 2010. Over the year, it’s been a way to watch you grow up, and learn about this weird thing that happened to you – out of nowhere you just came to be – and change from a baby into a little boy who will some day be a bigger boy and then someday, unbelievably, a man. I thought that this would be a nice way for my family, and your mom’s family, to be a part of that even when they couldn’t be with us in person. And it worked. The only problem now is that no one will ever let me stop. Not that I want to.
The person who I think benefitted most from this was my mom, your Grandma Miles, a person you only knew for a tragically short time and who, sadly, you will never really remember. It falls on me then to help you know her. And thanks to this magical site I can, and will, one day turn this blog into a book that will sit on your shelf, and you and I will read it from time to time, and when you get to the page that we just passed, which was your love note to your grandmother, and then this one, I want you to stop and pay careful attention – to think about this warm and wonderful light that shone on you only briefly.
From the moment your Grandma Miles found out you’d be joining us in the world, she was ecstatic. At that point she’d been a grandmother for 20 years already, and had fallen head over heels in love with the role. She obsessed over and poured love upon first my sister’s children, and then my brother’s and then, finally, in 2010, my own child. You. She cried when I told you you’d be coming, and asked about you every day while you were growing inside your mom, and then cried again when you arrived and she couldn’t be there. She cried when she met you a few weeks later and then for most of the next year wanted only to talk about you when I spoke to her. What’s Charlie doing now? She’d ask and I’d say something stupid (but true) like “being cute” and she’d correctly stop me and say, “What does that mean?” “What is he doing?” She meant specifically – she wanted to know what you’d learned, no matter how small that seemed. As a mother of three, she knew how quickly things change and how one day you can be this helpless baby who just lies around looking cute and then suddenly you’re moving and making noises and picking up knowledge like an adorable, smiley sponge.
And when I got busy and didn’t call her for a week, and when her vision got worse and she had some health problems and had to give up her apartment for periods, she wasn’t able to see your blog, or read my emails and I think probably she woke up every day wondering what you were up to. I hope when she went to sleep it was with thoughts of you, because it’s impossible to be sad when you’re around – in person, or even just in mind. When she moved to a room in the Health Center, where they sent her for special care, she covered her bulletin board – every inch – in pictures of you.
Life is a great and confusing thing, and neither of us will ever understand why she left us so suddenly. She was a brave, strong woman who overcame hardships that even those of us closest to her can probably never truly imagine. She had to learn to walk twice — first, like you, as a baby, and then, later, as a 49-year-old woman with a body that wouldn’t cooperate. Problems fell into her path like junk from the back of a trash-filled pick-up and she swerved around them again and again, often with great effort, and no help from anyone else. She had been having a lot of trouble in her later life, her body failing her more and more, and every setback was harder for her, so when she got very sick, very quickly I think she just lacked the strength to fight. For the first and last time, she couldn’t swerve in time.
I hope, when you are having bad days, you’ll think about her. You can ask me to tell you stories about how she overcame problems far worse than anything you will ever face, I hope; stories I sometimes think of when I’m feeling defeated and it helps me realize that my problems are nothing in comparison.
We didn't know how bad things would get when you and your Mom and I went to visit her, two days before she left us so suddenly. We just wanted to cheer her up. And we did – thanks to you. One thing that makes me feel good, even now, so soon after she left, is that one of her last memories, on perhaps the last lucid day of her life, was of you were sitting at the end of her bed. “Oh, Charlie boy,” she said, because that’s what she called you. “I love you.”
Boy, did she love you.
Dad
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