I don’t believe that anymore.
Timing isn’t the whole story. Sometimes life gives you another door, forty-one years later, at 9:17 on a Tuesday night on a phone nobody calls anymore.
But here’s the part I’d actually put on a sign if I could.
The door only opened because somebody finally said the true thing out loud.
He said it from a hospital bed with weeks left, and it worked, and I’m grateful every day.
But he could have said it in 1984 in my parents’ kitchen. Or in 1986 instead of that last letter. Or in 2021 when his son looked up my address.
And I could have mailed four and a half pages instead of tearing them up.
Don’t wait for a hospital bed to say the true thing.
Say it this week. Say it badly if you have to.
The people who love you can survive an awkward conversation.
They cannot get back forty-one years.
