People around us can be so shallow
Hollow, absent a core.
Guided by fear, lost to the voices of their own discontent.

Yet time and truth brought us together,
Our time. Our truth. Not theirs.
We shared laughs scattered between decades.
You challenged me to break the cycle.
I accepted.
You told me things that showed me who I was.
A child of living,
Your son in this life,
Different yet the same somehow.

I heard a whisper in my heart this morning,
And I knew that you were gone.
I am so saddened by your passing,
Of the lost time, the insanity that put a valley between us.
I will miss not knowing more of you.

I accept the sword,
As I am now the oldest generation of my birth,
Free to do it differently,
Your first born was not made to be like them.
You gave life to a fighter, a warrior of light and truth,
Honor and character birthed from the fires of my own destruction.
As you said, it’s my time to change everything.

The tears I shed this morning are for you and I,
For us,
Father and son, son and father,
The tears, our Holy Ghost.
The laughs our sacred memory.
Sadness will not be the legacy we share.
Defeat not an option to our undertaking.

Goodbye my father, I will see you often on the road that lies ahead.