Sunday, December 8, 2013

Apologies for the Long Delay

Blog followers, please accept my apologies for the long delay in posting new reviews. Sadly, my son, Thomas, a wonderful young man with some serious challenges in life, passed away on October 4. Some of you may remember reading about him in a post I wrote from 2012 on Terry Trueman's work. http://thescribblerintherye.blogspot.com/2012/09/a-response-to-life-happens-next-by.html. As a result, I have taken a brief sabbatical from my work here to mourn his passing. I will be resuming the regular reviews very soon. I hope you will indulge me in posting my goodbyes to Thomas here.



Thomas Allen Forson, 3/31/1991-10/4/2013


To my sweet, precious baby boy. You have gone and left us…to that place I used to sing to you about many nights when I would feed you before bed and you would smile up at me. That place there is “sugar in the rock and the honey don’t stop” and now you can taste that honey without fear. This is one of those moments when the language I have is too inadequate to express to you the jagged grief and the heavy anguish I carry in my soul without you. How can the sun continue to rise and set without my precious Thomas? I hope you know, Tommy, the fierce love I have for you. I loved every single second of being a Mommy to you. From the moment you pounded on the wall in the morning to come and get you ready for your day to the final meal I fed you at night, I delighted in being the one to care for you and play with you, even if I never felt worthy to be a Mommy to such a pure spirit. You warmed me to my core with your tight hugs and your easy giggles. But oh how I worried over you and felt sorrow for you. So very many times I would watch you play with your toys and wonder about the meaning of your life. I was often sad because I thought your life was such a small little thing and that you were being cheated out of so many experiences. There were too many “nevers” in your future—and yet through all of that watching I had no idea that I was studying a very important class; me, the schoolteacher with all of that purchased higher education, all of those years of instructing students in classrooms, Mrs. Forson was getting her most advanced degree from a highly-skilled, master teacher. Small life indeed! What a fool I was. Thomas Forson modeled empathy, tolerance, piety, innocence, love and kindness, (although I have to say Tommy’s lessons on being gentle needed some work, since no one who ever got a hug from Thomas could ever call his touch gentle). Even his frustrations were fleeting and easily replaced with smiles. In my sense of superiority I missed the obvious fact that Thomas had already learned the lessons we common souls spend a lifetime struggling to master. Tommy had a life with a powerful purpose that schooled everyone who knew him and he never said one word—how amused he must have been to watch us all care for him and worry over him, amused to watch us obviously feeling so much smarter and wiser than he was. If I weren’t so humbled by my grief today I might giggle myself at the ridiculous irony of it. 

And now sweet boy, I must end this short letter. So I’ll say to you one last time, like I sang to you in your favorite bedtime song on our last night together, “don’t you weep Little Baby. Come and lay your bones on the alabaster stone and be my ever-lovin’ baby.”

No comments:

Post a Comment