The Reason We're Here

Little sweetheart, I’m working hard on the new album and my physical therapy too, as I’ve told you, and finally at the end of the day, sometime around 9pm or so, I’ll watch an hour or two of something (often The West Wing because it brings you close in my memory and comforts me) before I say my prayers for you and us and finally go to bed.

I was watching last night when something made me decide to look at something else, something new, a kind of talk show on Netflix. It was amusing and king of mindless but then Drew Barrymore came on and I was more interested because she always makes me think of you.

In part, I think it’s because you had that picture of her in fairy wings clipped from a magazine as part of the collage you’d made and hung in your bedroom in Davis while in high school. It had all your heroes and referenced your friends and family and dreams of life. When I finished the band’s first album for you, Of Love and Loss, I made a collage myself filled with photos and memorabilia, your pictures and words and you and I together. We took it to the roof and snapped high res photos of it so it could be reproduced as a poster included within the folds of the double-CD. And the collage itself - filling an entire large cork board - graces the red table room always, the center of the shrine as you are the center of my life.

But anyway… Drew Barrymore.

Like a lot of things, I never had given her much thought until you brought her to my mind. And then I saw how her kindness and genuineness reminded me so very much of you. On this show there were several instances that brought that and you to mind but maybe above all was an exchange where she said what a blessing it is to have interactions with each other, if even only in a moment at the grocery store when you look into another person’s eyes and speak to one another. To have that opportunity to share kindness and lift each other up.

I think more than anything, little sweetheart, this is the most important thing I learned from you - how you told me that you knew why you were on earth and that it was simply to love, to share your love with others.

What a treasure, what a blessing you are, little sweetheart. And how I long and aspire to do as you would have me and to be more and more like you each day. Please help and guide me, my little sweetheart. I love you with all my heart and soul. And I’m listening. Always. Always.