What Remains

Weekly wisdom to level up your creative life in 3 minutes, for free.

A SHORT STORY

I couldn’t hear what he was saying.

My sister called suddenly. “Mike, I’m on speakerphone. Dad wanted me to call you.”

At the other end, I heard only a whisper of my father’s voice. He was fighting back tears.

“I’m calling because I need to say goodbye. I knew this would happen sooner or later. I want you to know—you’re a fantastic son, and I love you.”

My sister said they would give him some pain medication. She promised to call me back.

Those were the last words my father ever spoke to me.

This past Monday, I was with him again on the phone as he took his final breath.

Tibetans believe hearing is the last sense to die. So we made sure he knew he was loved as he passed to the other side.

We made sure he was at peace.

And when he left, the horizon opened up before me. With both my mother and father now gone, something in me felt different—like I had become more whole in their absence.

It reminded me of something—how, in mythology, rescuing your father from the belly of the whale is perhaps the hardest trial for any hero.

My father was not an emotional man, nor had ever spoken such love to me so directly.

But in that moment, the yearning I had carried since childhood was healed.

He was rescued, if only for a moment.

How does the presence—or absence—of loved ones shape the way you move through today?

A PIECE OF ART

“The River Cannot Go Back” by Kahlil Gibran

It is said that before entering the sea
a river trembles with fear.
She looks back at the path she has traveled,
from the peaks of the mountains,
the long winding road crossing forests and villages.
And in front of her,
she sees an ocean so vast,
that to enter
there seems nothing more than to disappear forever.
But there is no other way.
The river can not go back.
Nobody can go back.
To go back is impossible in existence.
The river needs to take the risk
of entering the ocean
because only then will fear disappear,
because that’s where the river will know
it’s not about disappearing into the ocean,
but of becoming the ocean.

Grateful,

Michael