And in that second, something did not add up in a way I could not explain, because the date printed at the top of that letter was from four years ago — and four years ago, the man whose handwriting my signature was written in had already been gone for six months.
Let me explain, because it stopped my heart in my kitchen too.
My name is James Mitchell. So was my father’s. He and I were the two who mattered to each other — James the elder and James the younger, though nobody ever called us that; to the family I was just Jim, and he was Dad.
The signature at the bottom of that letter, the one written exactly the way I write mine, with the same curve on the last letter and the same spacing — it was not mine. It was his. We had the same name and, it turns out, nearly the same hand, because he was the one who taught me how to sign it in the first place.
My father wrote that letter in the last year of his life, when he knew where things were headed and did not tell any of us how fast. And he arranged, through a service that mails letters on a chosen future date, to have it sent to me four years after he was gone — because he had done the math on my life, and he had guessed, correctly, the year I would need it most.
The private details, the little ones that made me go back to the top to be sure I had not missed something — those were things only a father knows. The way I bite the inside of my cheek when I am worried. The name of the dog I had when I was seven. The thing I said at his hospital bed that I have never repeated to a living soul, because there was no living soul there to hear it but him.
It read like instructions because it was instructions. This past year has been the hardest of my adult life — a marriage that nearly came apart, a job lost, a long stretch where I did not much like getting up in the morning. My father could not have known the particulars. But he knew his son, and he knew that somewhere around this age the men in our family hit a wall, because he had hit the same one, and he wrote down for me exactly how he climbed over it.
The line in the middle, the one that made me stop and look up, said: “You’re going to want to quit something around now, Jim. Don’t. I nearly quit the same thing, and it turned out to be the best part of my whole life. Trust your old man on this one.”
He was right. He was right about all of it. I have read that letter more times than I can count, and I have done what it told me to do, and slowly the year has begun to turn.
I got a letter signed with my own name that I never wrote. It turns out the man who shares that name reached across four years and the whole distance between the living and the dead to tell his son to hold on. I am holding on, Dad. I got your letter. It arrived exactly when you knew it would.
