Love, loss and light

I am the sum of years and echoes,

forty-four winters deep,

twenty-one of them spent being “Dad.”

Two lives that came from love I no longer live inside,

yet I still carry every heartbeat they gave me.

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Love, loss, and light — it all lives in me.

(repeat or echo softly twice)

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I’ve poured ink instead of tears,

bled sweat instead of words,

trying to remember who I was before I became

everything for everyone.

My first two taught me patience and purpose,

made a fighter out of a boy still haunted

by the ghosts of his own childhood.

Then came her — the woman who reopened the door,

the storm that built a softer world.

Together we made another daughter,

pure light, pure laughter.

And just when I thought I’d learned the rhythm,

life gave me a son I never planned,

a mirror I wasn’t ready to face.

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Love, loss, and light — it all lives in me.

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I was the first hand to touch him,

then gone for seven days —

a hospital bed, a heart holding on.

I came back thinner in body, heavier in soul.

Seven days that rewired me.

Seven days that turned love into survival.

Now I stand here,

half a century of lessons carved into my skin.

I’ve loved two women fiercely,

both in different lifetimes,

both still alive inside me somehow.

It’s not that I stopped loving them —

I just can’t find the fire that used to sing.

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Love, loss, and light — it all lives in me.

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Maybe my trauma taught me to protect more than connect.

Maybe I’m better with creatures who speak through energy —

dogs, kids, souls that don’t lie.

I move like them: instinct first,

truth before tradition,

raw before polite.

I’m not made for this world of filters and fear.

I’m animal and ink.

I’m spirit and scar.

I’ve built peace, lost it, rebuilt again.

I’ve chosen life even when it didn’t feel like mine.

So if you hear this —

know it isn’t a sad song,

it’s a plea for understanding.

How a man can break twice

and still rise loving.

How he can hold his children close

but let their mothers go with grace.

How he can live between love and loneliness

and still whisper thanks.

Because the ink remembers what we forget —

the blood, the fight,

the quiet beauty of simply staying.

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Love, loss, and light — it all lives in me.