Dylan Stafford

Good morning up in heaven sister Lisa,

I dropped the ball last year and forgot to write you on the 4th of July for 2022. My goal was to write you every year for the first twelve years after your passing. I failed last year.

Progress, not perfection: that’s what you taught me when you introduced me to twelve-step living. So I’m forgiving myself for not keeping a perfect streak of writing each 4th of July, and I’m back at the keyboard this year to type you a letter.

This year is the eighth 4th of July since your passing in 2016. This year I thinking about strength. And I’m thinking about art. And I’m thinking about you.

Art, first.

We got to go to Italy this summer. We took the boys on a pilgrimage to art, to the Sistine Chapel and St. Peter’s Basilica and Venice and the beauty of Italy. Marisa planned for a year. She put so much care into the itinerary. Sharing this experience with our boys is a gift I will always remember.

St. Peter’s knocked me back. Walking into the sanctuary, raising my eyes to take in the enormity of the space, it hit me. The centuries of work. The generations of effort. All looking up to something higher. I’d been to Italy before, but I’m older now. I’m starting to be mature enough to be humbled by the immensity of the beauty.

Life is short. Art is long.

All the planners and popes and craftsmen who built that space. Centuries in the making. Working an entire lifetime and yet not seeing the finished product. Working on something your father and grandfather worked on. What is it like to live like that? What could I aspire to in the second half of my life, that I could pass forward to my sons? We go on pilgrimage to ask bigger questions, to be reminded to look up.

Standing there, staring up at the beauty, it hit me–like a pulse went through me, as if I’d struck my breast with my fist, but across my whole body. It was an instant of impact.

I won’t philosophize too much more. Let me say that we need beauty. We need art. We need to be reminded of how beautiful life is, for when life gets hard. Because life will be hard.

Strength, next.

This week Christian is in a basketball camp. He’s learning new skills. He doesn’t know anyone at the camp. We are in Phoenix, in a different state, for this camp. It’s a big deal in his life, getting to be here. He was nervous and excited yesterday, for the first day. And it went great. Last night he had so much to share from the lessons of day one.

He’s getting stronger. He’s eleven. He starts sixth grade this year. Middle school. How will this summer of art and practice help him grow?

This month Jackson is away to be a camp counselor. He left Sunday morning early. He’s growing too. Sixteen. Six foot, two-and-a-half inches tall. A rising junior. This month will be longest away from him we’ve ever been. There’s a Jackson-shaped-hole in our family constellation this week, with the looming departure to college over the horizon.

I trust Jackson will be strong and true and do-the-right-things-when-no-one-is-looking–or not. Kids have to grow and learn their own lessons and sometimes we learn most from messing up. But he’s on-the-court. He’s sixteen and we’ve given him the best we were capable of to get this far. He gets to drive the car of his life this month.

Being a parent, fumbling forward, being committed to the growth and development of our children. Art and Strength. We spend time and money and effort to introduce our children to art, and to help them become strong: bodily, mentally and spiritually. We do our best.

Life always changes. Up and down. Good and bad. Like the weather. Like when you left us Lisa, too early.

With children, we aim at getting our children ready for the rest of their lives. We have eighteen years to prepare them to live for eighty years: to be strong and to appreciate beauty and to carry on without us. We want to introduce them to possibilities. We want to teach them to discern their own gifts and talents. We want them to know beauty, to look up and aspire. We want them to have strength, to be able to set an aim and trudge toward it over months and years and decades: to lead lives of significance.

You, last.

I miss you Lisa.

You loved beauty.

You were very strong.

And, you’re not here any more and there’s a hole in my life shaped just like your spirit. Even your absence is still a presence. Your spirit still hovers like I’ve written you before, effervescent like the clouds and ever in the background and heights of my life.

Thank you for the gift of sobriety. Thank you for holding my hand and guiding me into twelve-step living. Your legacy of generosity lives on even after you’ve gone. The man I get to be as a husband and as a father owes its existence to you. You give me strength, even though you’ve passed, to keep going and to do the work to be a husband and dad and to pay-it-forward.

Sobriety taught me how to look down. How to stare into the abyss instead of floating on the surface. Looking down taught me that I’m broken, and it’s that crack where God comes in. And, looking down gives me access to looking up, to being awed by life. That’s what happened at St. Peter’s Basilica this year. That pulse that hit me, I was oblivious on past trips in earlier decades of my life. I’d not yet been broken enough yet to let all that beauty hit me. Sobriety broke me, the grain of wheat began to die. Your leaving us broke me all over again.

Lisa, we all miss you: Mom and Dad and Jon and Marisa and the boys, all of us.

I miss you too sister Lisa. I love you.

Have a happy 4th of July. Enjoy the fireworks from your perch in heaven.

Your brother Dylan