Love Letter 30

Dear Tom,

You’ve been gone a long time now it seems, and yet the tears still hover right near the surface ready to well up when I’m reminded of how wonderful you were – how much your life gave to everyone in it. All it took was your sister’s blog post tonight, all it took was hearing again how your love is so deeply woven into her life. You have such a unique and special place in my heart – part mentor, part inspiration, part stabilizer. Yeah, stabilizer. It’s that quiet Spirit of yours that still lives on around us, the trusted friend who could listen to an endless confused story and then offer some coherent frame that let us all see things how they really are. Did you have any idea the number of people who lived just a bit larger because they knew you? So much has been said this last year about you; much of it is more eloquent than I can be in these short words. I want to say that I miss you though, and that I seem to discover more and more as the weeks and months pass by, how much I love you. I’m not big on regrets you may recall, but I do have one. I didn’t tell you often enough what I thought of you, how I felt about you. I told you some, but not enough and now when I want to tell you how strongly I feel about your presence within and around us, you’re not here to say it to . . . or are you? There is something of you here for absolute sure, so let me say it again, I love you Tom. I loved your generous Spirit, your deep integrity – that’s right, your deep and profound integrity, your courage to grow, I loved your passion for knowing people. You always did have a sense that each soul is worth knowing, worth caring for. It’s no wonder we all loved you. I’d like to show you that I love you. I’ve got one way that I think will do it if I can grow into it, grow into the kind of man you were. I can love the people you loved – all of them. The ones who are closest I’ve always loved; you know that and you know I’ll always do that. But all the rest, like the whole of humanity, them I’m going to learn to love like you loved them. If I can do that, even just a bit more, well then I’ll know that you are still with us, still loving us as we love you.

Sam