Dear Friends,
I have never felt such an infusion of love. And I have never needed it more. Thank you.
This is the most difficult time of my life. My beautiful, beloved boy, Finn Thilo Trommer, killed himself on Saturday, August 14. He would have turned 17 on September 11.
As I wrote to one of his mentors earlier tonight:
“It was something I have known about Finn since he was born. He carried inside him a deep unease, a lack of peace. He expected so much of the world—he wanted everyone to be as dedicated and as 150% as he was. He shined so brightly, I believe, because he had to summon that much luminosity just to meet the darkness that was ever inside him. And so although the inner struggle is what eventually killed him, I refuse to vilify it, because it is also what shaped him into the radiant and magical being he was. He lived such a big, rich, full life. He gave everything. Everything. He was a comet. Astonishingly brilliant and then gone. I pray every day now that he finds the peace he never had in this life. I pray that peace finds him. That he feels what it is to know no lack. To know his own beauty and sufficiency.”
In fact, I pray this for all of us–that we may all know for a certainty the love that supports us, that is all around us, that is us. I pray that we may all know beauty and communion with the world, with each other, with the divine. I pray for us to know and practice love, to choose it in every moment.
I am so grateful for all the notes you send. I read each of them, and as I read them, I thank each of you by name. I am sorry i cannot respond to you all personally, but please know that your love is sustaining me. I don’t know how anyone would ever meet this heartbreak, this devastation, without a tsunami of love.
I have been deep in a cocoon of grief and love. This weekend I will celebrate the wedding of my wonderful stepdaughter to an amazing man. In the meantime, I am protecting this tender, raw space in which I am able to meet grief so nakedly, in which love is transforming me in the most astonishing ways. I am being rewired, rewritten, remade. It is the most unwanted and powerful gift I have ever been given.
It will be a bit longer before I resume the daily poems–I am not ready yet to have any commitment beyond meeting each moment. I want to experience every second of this, to feel it all, and it is taking all my energy. But soon there will be poems to share. They are shaping me, helping me meet this most heartbreaking, heart-opening time.
If you pray, please pray for the peace of all who do not know peace–pray for my son and for anyone who has been unable to find peace in an enduring way.
I have never been more certain that love is everything. Everything. It matters so much how we treat each other, how we treat ourselves. I am so grateful for you, friends.
Love,
Rosemerry