My son Griffin dazzled me.
I couldn’t look away.
Each moment of his life was aglow,
white-hot from the forge of living.
When Griffin died,
the forge of his life went dark.
His life no longer burns through the present.
All the moments of his life
are of equal brightness to me now.
Each moment is a memory:
Griffin made coffee with cinnamon,
he loved the long take in movies,
he read about dinosaurs,
he laughed around the plug of his pacifier.
It’s all one chain now.
All these memories
are equally present.
Sometimes, a life is revealed by the Light.
Sometimes, it is revealed by darkness.
I have 22 years of memory.
I see every moment with heart-wrenching clarity,
because my eyes are no longer dazzled
by the present.
—Mike Huber