For Signe - To Stay Young

Signe, you are almost five months old, and each day you are doing new things and becoming more aware of what is around you. I've already mourned so many times what of your babyhood has come and gone, as I watch you play or feel your size as I pick you up. I hold you against my chest and we look into the mirror, and the face whose eyes catch sight of me is not so tiny as it once was, and is more full of awareness, smiles more readily and carries more expression. I try to remember those moments when you smile at me because they are perfect - you are simple and your reactions are perfect in their simplicity. Nothing else I accomplish in my day is so pure as to see you smile at me.

I am scared for my dad, Signe - I know that your grandfather will pass away before I'm prepared, because I will never be prepared. It is the same with your grandmother - and yet there is something more with my father, because he is a man and I am supposed to be a man, and even now, at my age, when I am uncertain how to be strong, I find myself thinking of him and wondering what he would do, and when I am sad I think of him and I wish for him to know that I am suffering, and to tell me that everything will be okay. He has, my whole life, been sensitive and unafraid of his feelings as no other man I've known, yet he seems brave for it, and unafraid, the very antithesis of the doubt and fear that so often consume me, for the mortality of myself and everyone I love.

Signe, the other night I dreamt you grown, with a baby girl of your own that you brought to us, your parents, her grandparents. I had so many times tried and failed to imagine what your face would look like grown, and in my dream I saw you clearly, and your face was yours, yet different. Your same innocence was in your eyes and your smile. If you have a child, it is likely that he or she will never know their great-grandparents, but if they come to a world that I am still in, I will speak about them, because they gave me all the best characteristics of myself. It is the same as how I see my grandmother in my father, and in myself - and though my memories of her fade, my sense that she is a part of me only grows stronger with time. I'll tell your child about my grandmother, too, because with time she becomes mythical to me, transforming from a person that I knew into a facet of the world that is eternal. She has become all of nature to me, the sanctity we owe the natural world and the awe that we feel for it.

Life is so short, and passes so fast, and we are too soon old and too late wise. Each moment matters - I'll try to remind myself of that often, to become a better father and a better friend. Time will judge me in that effort - time, and your happiness. I wish you that happiness - of loved ones who humbly learn how to care for you, and raise you to be self-possessed, self-aware, and compassionate. I am so excited to be part of your life, and I wish for nothing to come between us, to keep us from teaching each other and sharing all the joys of being alive.