My mother gave me two lives.
The first in a hospital in Helsinki, sometime in the late eighties, in the normal way mothers have been giving life since the beginning of our species.
The second she gave me as she tragically passed away while battling with cancer - in just 72 brutal days.
I don’t mean that metaphorically, or at least not entirely. Grief of a parent does something strange to a person. When the full weight of how short and precious life actually is finally crashes down on you - not as an idea you’ve nodded along to, but as something you feel in your bones and aching heart at 3am - it forges you into someone new. I came out the other side a different man. At 37, my mother gave me a second birth. I’ve been trying to figure out what to do with it ever since.
One thing became immediately clear: I had to stop waiting.
After the birth of our daughter, I was ambushed by feelings I had never felt before.
Some days I felt crushing anxiety and the onset of a new kind of impostor syndrome - the kind only parents know. The classic
“WTF am I doing?” and “How is this kid still alive?”
kind.
In other moments I felt a joy so visceral and primal it knocked me off my feet and made every other high-point in my life pale in comparison.
And then one day, something else arrived: inspiration. I realised that watching a young human grow up, and guiding her through that journey, is not just the greatest responsibility I’ll ever take on, but the greatest privilege. There’s so much I want to share with her. Little pieces of knowledge that made my mind explode when I first encountered them. Pet theories I’ve cultivated over the years to make sense of the world. Ideas about science, music, love, and so much more.
It felt selfish - and it is - but it’s also what makes us human. The incremental growth of knowledge across generations, passed from one to the next, is what took us from caves to the Moon, and from dying of a simple cut wound to defeating Covid.
Of course there is school and university for most of this. But there’s so much outside those curricula, and rightly so: questions about morality and values, explanations of the world that span several disciplines and are therefore often missed by our fragmented education system, the kind of hard-won things you only understand after you’ve lived a bit.
So I had the idea to start a series of blog posts - letters, really - where I share things I hope will be valuable to my children.
“Why not just wait till she grows up and talk to her?”
I hear you ask. Well, who knows how long I’ll be around, and what life will bring. My beloved mother was just 66 - full of life and with many plans, when it was decided that her story will be cut a lot shorter. It’s better to write things down now, so they can be revisited when the time is right. And maybe some of these letters will be useful for others too. It certainly provides a great excuse to spout unsolicited advice, opinions and theories into the ether.
I first had this idea in 2021. Then life happened - moving countries, building a home, a second child on the way, a little boy this time. I kept finding reasons to wait. Then my mother was taken from us in less than 3 months and by the time I processed the most intense stages of grief I ran out of reasons not to write.
Our daughter’s name starts with M. Our son’s with E. Hence: Letters to M & E. It also neatly reminds me that most likely no one will ever read these - except, hopefully one day, the two people who matter most.
Let’s hope I keep going this time. Please let me know in the comments if anything here is useful, or if you spot any errors.
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