Hope Chest

Sometimes I wonder how long it will be until you can read these letters easily. And then I wonder when, or if, you will find them meaningful, emotionally and personally. When you were a few months old, I had no idea of the girl you’d be at four or five or six. Now you’re almost eight, and your personality appears as solid as the sunrise once the highest cliffs are cleared. But I still don’t know what that means. Nothing can tell me exactly the person you’ll become, nothing but the happening of it, the actual becoming. 

In a strange way, writing to a hoped-for future reader is like writing to a ghost, a vaporous ectoplasm comprised of memory and imagination. It would be easier to put down in words the things I hope for you than it is to guess how to best address you. Who knows how many years will have passed between, what our relationship will be or have been by then?

And what do I hope for you on this day that you get around to reading these sentences? What can I hope that isn’t simply salutations and cliches? To be sure, I hope you are happy and well. I hope you still love your old father, or the memory of him if he’s gone. I hope that the random accidents of life have not reshaped you too far from the person you are as I know you now. I love the person you are, and I’m happy for both of us that you have turned out to be exactly who you are. It seems almost impossibly fortunate to have fathered you.

I hope you have never been too altered by injuries invisible or visible. You know that I say this as a visible cripple myself. Whatever has gone on in your life since I composed this, I hope you are mostly glad. But I can’t know. I hope that if you do come to this with regrets, then I am around to remind you of the fallacy of all regret. Or of pride. You are not very much of a causal factor in who you become, none of us are, despite all the speeches about "consequences" you’ve been given by your elders since earliest childhood.

Or perhaps you have become someone who fiercely believes in causes and consequences yourself. Perhaps you are already a parent as well. Perhaps you have converted to some faith or another. Perhaps you have returned to the quietly stubborn evangelism of my sister, mother, aunts, and mother’s mother. Perhaps you have taken up the pioneer Mormon faith that your own mother’s mother left behind her. Heaven knows, you’ve spent enough of your formative years in deep Utah.

Or perhaps you are none of these things. Perhaps you are nothing I can imagine. I can’t bear to imagine you are nothing, although I know that’s one outcome out there in this forever uncertain universe of possibility. Children die, sometimes. It hurts my chest. It gives me a surge of burning dread just to write it down. I’ll not write it down again.

I will try to have mercy on myself, to imagine optimistically, to once more invoke our family motto, supra spem spero, and hope against hope. I imagine you now rather tall, taller than me to be sure, although probably not too strikingly taller than average. I imagine your blonde hair has darkened, as your mother’s did, to a honeyed wheat. I imagine you are sturdy and charming, a little wild, amusing, stoic, and not too concerned for your looks. (I'm composing hopes using who you are now, as I know you, and a few of my favorite traits of your female relations closest to me.)

I imagine that whatever shocks the world has thrown at you so far--there must needs be some, as any fool knows who sings--you’ve shrugged through them after reeling for a time when they staggered you. I very much like to imagine you as resilient. Please be resilient, for yourself and for me. 

You will have made mistakes, or what you and others gravely consider mistakes. There are no mistakes. There are misfortunes, which then lead on, both to other misfortunes and to marvelous things. Mistakes are for others to appraise in you. Leave them be. If you grieve them, you will only end up confabulating stories about them to make yourself and others feel better about you and your self-improving narrative. Now that would be a mistake.

I imagine you will have forgotten many, most, maybe almost all of our happy episodes together in the years between your birth and the autumn evening I composed these aching words. That’s inevitable. Of all the happiest episodes I had with my own father before I was your age, I remember only a handful vividly. I remember a Sunday afternoon one spring or summer when he and I spent a sunny hour sitting together, digging in the backyard sandbox, his wheelchair parked beside him. He amazed me with all the crenellated constructions he could conjure out of that featureless sand that only slumped into hillocks for me. I remember a dark winter evening when he made fencing foils out of cardboard tubes for the two of us, when he fashioned leftover construction paper into outsized pirate hats. I was in a wheelchair myself that night, and the two of us, both little people with bones of brittle china, rolled back and forth daringly as we dueled, sword fighting with our cardboard and laughing until our hats fell off.

A few memories like that, memories that were exceptionally pleasant, cheerful, and good, I prefer to imagine, hopefully, you’ve also retained. And I hope you are glad to hear from me, even if not from whomever or whatever nothing I have become myself by then, to hear from me as I now, ever-shifting, like everyone, still am. I choose to imagine you reading all these letters seriously, carefully, glad to have them, and to have these memories of the mostly-gone people I've recorded in them.

I imagine you as a bright young woman reading, as a strong and curious being. I hope you humor me in these imaginations. And I hope you choose to keep these letters, keep me, with you, then.