8 years, 10 months, and 17 days. Another holiday season is upon us. Another holiday season without you. Sigh. I miss you. Love is putting your needs before mine.

My most dearest Shosh and Jaialai:

Remember, love isn’t about putting anyone or everyone before yourself — only the person(s) you love. Love is wanting the other to succeed and doing your part to make it happen.

If you put the needs of your significant other above yours and she, likewise, put your needs above hers, how could the relationship possibly fail? Too often, it fails because people are inherently selfish and think of themselves first … often at the exclusion of their significant others. They profess love, but they act otherwise.

Too often, for example, I see parents spoil their children in the name of loving them. That is not love! That is the height of selfishness! That is about doing what is easy and convenient for the parents in order to extract instant gratification from the children. That is not putting the needs of the children first! If you love your children, you want them to succeed and be loved by others as well. Spoilt children are denied the necessary guidance and training necessary by their parents to help them be self-disciplined, to have grit, and to practice other skills necessary for success in life.

One of the take-aways from my research for my Honors Thesis on Childrearing Practices and Prosocial Development is that parents must be consistent and timely in their efforts to guide their children and teach them self-discipline. Often, when parents are tired, for example, they let things slide and will permit children to engage in activities that are otherwise prohibited, e.g., spending hours in front of the TV. This confuses the children. If too much TV is bad, how come it’s OK when mom is tired and refuses to take the kids to the park next door to get exercise and fresh air?

So be consistent. Try your best to put the needs of those you love above your creature comfort and personal convenience.

Know that I got up to work each morning at 2:30 – 3:00 AM all those years because I love you. I sacrificed sleep in order to provide for you and, more importantly, be home in time for dinner with you most evenings. Waking up at 2:30 – 3:00 AM, when the air is cool and the bed warm, is never convenient and never ever comfortable. Yet, I did it anyway … for you.

Actions matter more than words. Love is best shown in addition to spoken.

All my love, always and forever,

Dad

P.S., I hope you guys had a happy Thanksgiving. I cannot imagine what the holidays are like for you. When I last saw you guy, Jaialai was 5 and you, almost 9, Shosh. Recently, I saw Bruised with Halle Berry and it really drove home how lost you must have felt when you lost me. It breaks my heart. I am sorry that this befell us. Justice will prevail and we will reunite.

8 years, 10 months, and 2 days. Live. Live your life to the fullest. Live to not regret.

You should not ask – to know is a sin – which end

the gods have given to me, or to you, Leuconoe, nor

should you meddle with Babylonian calculations. How much better to suffer

whatever will be, whether Jupiter gives us more winters, or whether this is our last,

which now weakens the Tyrrhenian sea on the pumice stones

opposing it. Be wise, strain the wine, and cut back long hope

into a small space. While we talk, envious time will

have fled: pluck the day, trusting as little as possible to the future.

https://classicalstudies.support/about/the-latin-page/horace-odes-1-11/

My dearest and most precious Shosh and Jaialai:

Regardless of what happens to me — to us — I want you promise me this: that you’d embrace life and live every precious moment to the best of your ability. Live as if tomorrow is not promised. Live so you end each day with little or no regret.

Despite being a two-time refugee, Fortune had been kind to me. Life gave me you — two smart and healthy sons — the best gift possible for any man. Yes, there were years of hard work and tears, of waking during predawn hours to embrace wet and dew-filled leaves on countless berry fields and dinning on dry peanut butter sandwiches made of day-old bread on sale for cheap, of super salty entrées during meals to stretch the little protein available and to ensure everyone in our household of more than a dozen eats, of fighting over the air vents on those cold winter mornings then the oil furnace is fired up by grandma but for a few moments to warm up the old house just enough for us to get out of bed, and of wearing hand-me-downs, shoes two sizes too large, and torn clothing purchased at bargain prices. But there were also laughter and love as the siblings learned to take care of each other, of waking up to piano music that wafted through the old house on weekends, of falling asleep to the murmur of new-found friends while sleeping outside the train station in Paris or on the beaches of Nice or Mykonos, of sharing a table dance in London with a daughter of a member of the House of Lords (so she claimed), of getting lost in the warren that is Tokyo and spending the afternoon watching students practice kendo at a dojo I was never able to rediscover, and of feeling the insignificance of us as I stood on a bridge over water high up in the mountain on a dark and star-filled night where I could not tell where the sky ended and the earth begun.

I would not have traded any of my life for those precious moments when I got to hold your hands, to carry you in my arms, or to breathe in the scent of you, when we searched the water of Scotts Mill for crawdads and guppies, when Shosh said seaweeds tasted like beans, or when Jaialai screamed “I love water!” while standing under an outdoors shower on a beach in Okinawa after days of refusing to get into the ocean … for fear of water.

Truth be told, despite everything, I have lived. I have loved … and have had my heart broken multiple times. I have traveled far and wide, both within the U.S. and abroad. I have had the honor of meeting a kind family in Missouri City, TX, who took me in and treated me as one of their own when I sold books door-to-door in the hot Texas summer because I had been disowned for wanting to move away for college and had no home to return to despite having given up my dream of attending a private Jesuit university in order to stay home, attend a local university and help care for my two younger sisters, of handfeeding hot soup to a homeless man who was shaking uncontrollably after being brought in on a cold winter night to a shelter I helped design and open, and of helping a young girl who had endured much more than anyone should at her age gain refugee protection under international law. I have had the pleasure of meeting and working with the Assistant Majority Leader of the Senate in his ornate office under the dome of the Capitol, of shaking hands with a U.S. President, and of working with corporate leaders to help pass laws and implement sound employment policies or health and welfare benefit plans to protect the human rights of American workers to fair and safe working environments and to accessible healthcare.

I am not perfect and have made many mistakes along the way. For example, if given another chance, I would have followed the lead of a partner at my law firm who had always taken a month off every year throughout his career to travel with his children and family to distant lands and to give them experiences and memories that would brighten their darkest days. In all my years, I rarely use more than a week of my month-long vacation on account of workload demands. I would have worked fewer 12-13-hour days and 6-7-day weeks and saved every spare moment to spend with you. I would have made every effort to find more moments like those when Jaialai said, “Thanks for choosing me, Dad!”

I always chose you — even during dark nights and long days when we were apart. I choose you still and live every waking moments to find my way back to you despite the long and overwhelming odds, the exhaustion of this years-long effort fighting on my own, and the promise of rest if I were to give it all up. (I have lived on borrowed time for nearly 500 days and know that this life can be taken from me at any moment.)

The long and short of it is that I have lived a full life, and I want the same for you … no matter what happens. Promise me that.

Remember, as Teacher Mary always said, “You are the boss of you.” Don’t let anyone detract from the beauty that life has to offer. Many will try. But don’t let them define you or your life’s experience.

Go forth and live. Look for opportunities to travel and meet others. Find beauty in the world and embrace each precious moment. Live not tepid lives, filled with regrets for things unsaid or undone.

Live, my sons. Live well and do good.

All my love, always and forever,

Dad

8 years, 9 months, and 23 days. Be principled and courageous in your thoughts and actions. Winners do; losers whine. Worse, winners build while losers destroy.

My most dearest Shosh and Jaialai:

These are dark days made worse by man’s selfishness and cruelty. Societies have historically come together during difficult times to help each other, yet during this time of pandemic when more than 5 million people have died globally and nearly 750,000 people have died in the U.S. alone, we still cruelly spout misinformation about vaccines and public health protocols, and many still refuse the simple act of vaccination for the protection of America’s most vulnerable — our young children, our elderlies, and our infirmed.

We pay lip service daily to Christian values — from the “In God We Trust” on our dollar bills to the use of the Bible for swearing in ceremonies — yet we cannot live the Two Commandments given to us by Jesus: Love God and Love Your Neighbors. We demand control over our bodies when resisting the COVID-19 vaccines and mask mandates (conveniently forgetting that mandated vaccination has been part of our childhood and schooling for decades) yet force our will upon others when they seek to abort fetuses to protect the mother’s health, in cases of incest or rape, etc.

We are an unprincipled lot. We are a lot of contrarians, happily fighting against the ideas and positions of others but refusing to live according to our own principles.

Don’t be like that. Live by your principles. Be principled in your thoughts and actions.

If you cannot articulate a principle for your action, then don’t do it. Don’t be a mindless sheep that follows the herd for lack of self-discipline and self-awareness.

Have the courage to act on your principles … even when you are the only one. I did when I stood alone against a multi-billion dollar organization that had defrauded consumers for years and years. Many knew. Despite their frequent complaints about the illegality of it all, none chose to act besides me.

Winners do. Losers whine.

Worse, winners build while losers destroy. From my years working on Capitol Hill, I know that it is extremely difficult to get legislation passed, but extremely easy to introduce poison pills to destroy bills. The same is true in life. Those courageous and relatively few work hard to build while the many often set out to destroy what they could not build. The latter includes the ankle biters we encounter daily in life — those who prefer to pull us down to their levels simply because they cannot rise to ours for want to effort and grit.

Be not like them, my sons. Always help if you can, but never do harm if you cannot help. Work hard to build a better future for yourselves and your community. We don’t live in a vacuum. The garbage and bad forms that once played gleefully to the crowd watching the Jerry Springer Show have now firmly entrenched themselves into the everyday lives of too many Americans. Sex tapes? Normal. No longer even shocking. Drunken tirades — or worse, sober tirades — and acts of gratuitous violence and cruelty are now almost common fodder for many social media and news media outlets. The garbage and poison that we have once dumped on distant shores have contributed to the environmental degradation that now affects our air, our water, our communities.

Be principled in your acts and thoughts. You know better. You are raised better. We are not animals that give in to every whim and defecate and fornicate anywhere the mood strikes. We don’t steal from the poor and vulnerable just because we can. We live by a higher code of conducts. We live by our principles.

Society can only progress if it remains true to its principles and not devolve into an animalistic free-for-all where those with the means and abilities take advantage of everyone else for the former’s short term gains. In the long term, shitting on the poor and vulnerable will only weaken society and hasten its demise. Likewise, in the long term, eschewing vaccines and endangering the vulnerable will only create additional hosts for the COVID-19 virus to mutate and grow more virulent to the detriment of everyone.

Stay true to your principles, even if others don’t. Remember, you are the boss of you and of no one else.

All my love, always and forever,

Dad