There is a letter I have been writing since I was a young man. In the soil, with my hands, in the years before the house stirred. I am writing it now in the hour before the walk, in the quiet before anything in the house has moved, on my knees in the place I have knelt for fifty years. I am writing it to the people I love most, which means I am writing it to the people I have most failed to reach, and the failing and the loving have always been done by the same hands.
My father is dead. He taught me how to walk out by doing it in front of me, one sentence at a time, in the last years of his life. I did not understand what I was seeing. I only understood that the closer he got to his own shame, the closer he got to me. I mistook the closeness for reconciliation. It was not reconciliation. It was demonstration. He was showing me the path. He did not live long enough to see me find it. I am finding it now, too late for him to see, and I am putting that into the dirt because there is nowhere else to put it.
There was a woman before this one. I will not pretend she does not belong in this letter. I married her young, before I had any of the words I have now, before I understood that what I brought to our bed was already a garden, already locked, already being tended in the dark by someone she would never meet. I told myself we were corrupting each other. That was convenient. She had her rows and I had mine and we each watered what was growing in the other. It is true as far as it goes. It does not go far. Her rows do not defend mine. Her failures do not subtract from what I did to her, which was this: I married her as a man who had already decided she would never be permitted to see me. I did not know I had decided it. I had decided it anyway. For the years we were together I handed her the vision of a man polished to not disturb the version she had fallen in love with, and I let her build her life around that, and when she began to sense the hiding I pretended it her problem and stood by that until she believed it. She may still believe it. I cannot go back and tell her. Telling her now would be another kind of tending, another kind of management, a thing I did for my own absolution and pretended was an apology. She does not owe me that. What I can do is write it here, where no one is owed anything, and say it: she never met me. Not once. Not on our wedding day, not on the day our life together ended, not in any of the rooms between. I gave her a husband. I did not give her myself. The failure of our marriage was not mutual. Some of it was. Not the foundational part. The foundational part was mine, and it was laid before she ever walked into my life.
And the one who is sleeping now, in the room behind me, the woman I have loved harder than I have loved any living person, she built her days around a man who was not entirely the man she believed herself to be loving. The man she loved was real. What she did not know about him was also real. They lived in the same body, tended by the same hands, and I could not separate them then and I cannot separate them now. What I can give her, what I am writing into this soil because I could not say it standing close enough for her to see me, is this. Every moment she felt something was wrong and could not find it, she was right. She was feeling this. She was feeling the distance between the man I showed her and the garden I kept from her, and that distance was mine to create and mine to maintain and I maintained it for the entire span of our life together, because showing her the truth felt, from inside the fear, like handing her a reason to leave. The truth is that the hiding was the reason. I handed it to her slowly, over years, in ways neither of us could see clearly, and I am sorry for that, and the sorry is not asking for anything, it is only the truest thing I have left to put in the ground.
The love was real. It came from the same soil as everything else. The soil was dark and the love grew in it anyway.
My mother. I do not know how to write to her because I am not going to write to her. She will die inside her garden. She is eighty. She has knelt every morning of her life and the kneeling is the only shape her love has ever taken, and to walk up her path and tell her that what she called love was the transmission of a wound older than her mother and older than her mother's mother would be to take from her the one thing she has. I will not take it. I have decided. The decision is its own kind of dishonesty and I am making it anyway because she has earned the right to die inside what she believes. My father got there. He walked himself most of the way out and he took me with him as far as he could. My mother did not get the same years. She got the kneeling. She will finish there. I will sit in her kitchen next month and we will talk about the weather and I will hold the secret of this walking in my mouth and not set it down in front of her, and the holding will be a betrayal, and I will bear it, because the alternative betrayal is larger and I am the one who has to decide which to commit.
I grieve her while she is still alive. I grieve the mother I would have had if her mother had not handed her the shears. I grieve her mother. I grieve the women behind her mother, whose names I do not know, who knelt in soil that is in me now whether I have admitted it or not.
And then there are my daughters, my oldest, the women now. This is where the letter gets quiet in me, because this is where I have the least right to write and the most need to.
