Let it Be

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A SHORT STORY

Whenever I'm in moments of transition, I often turn to poetry as an anchor.

Lately, as I watch my dad navigate the difficult process of letting go, I've been reflecting a lot on Hamlet's speech—"To be or not to be."

A year ago, one of my closest friends, Patrick, sent me an insight about the speech. Patrick is known as one of America's leading classical actors and has spent the better part of 40 years working on these texts.

He sent me a question: "How would you paraphrase 'to be or not to be'?"

I remember answering something along the lines of it having to do with death. Hamlet has just declared, "The play’s the thing wherein I’ll catch the conscience of the king," essentially narrowing his plan to using a performance to provoke a confession from the king. If successful, he will then have the courage to kill him. So, Hamlet comes to the audience to investigate this question of life and death—why he is wrestling with it and why we wrestle with it.

Even when I played Hamlet, I never fully grasped this aspect of the play. I struggled with it.

Then Patrick texted me back: "What if it's about the idea—'To let it be or not to let it be'?"

That simple shift in phrasing reframed everything for me. Instead of being solely about life and death, it became about agency—about the choice to accept or resist the unfolding of events. It illuminated Hamlet’s struggle in a new way, one that resonated deeply with my own questions about control, surrender, and fate.

Suddenly, the speech made much more sense. Especially in light of the question Hamlet wrestles with throughout the play—should I just let life happen? Or should I take arms against a sea of troubles? Should I take revenge? This inner conflict ultimately leads him to one of my favorite speeches "There is a special providence in the fall of a sparrow..."

And then, in his final lines before taking his last breath: "Had I but time—O, I could tell you—but let it be."

This, of course, leads to the double meaning in his last words: "The rest is silence."

I share this now because I see my dad wrestling with the same question as he slowly begins to let go—grappling with the tension between his will to hold on and the inevitability of his body's decline. Each day, he seems to hover between resistance and acceptance, caught in the delicate space between presence and departure. He doesn’t want to die, but his body is dying.

And so, I return to poetry to make sense of it.

What in your life right now is asking you to let go or hold on?

A PIECE OF ART

“Hamlet” by William Shakespeare

there's a special providence in
the fall of a sparrow.

If it be now, 'tis not to come; if it be
not to come, it will be now; if it be not now, yet it will come:
the readiness is all.

Since no man knows aught of what he leaves,
what is't to leave betimes?

Let be.

Grateful,

Michael