A letter from Aug 26th, 2021

Dear Manuel, I'm thinking about our father after reading this https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=28290408. I hesitate to phone him and we haven't spoken in years and only a few times over the decades. I don't know how to hold a conversation with anybody and I think its the same with him. Many awkward pauses and nothing of substance in between. Nothing about my life is anything he would care about or wish for me. No wife, no children, no home, only ideas and pastimes and projects. His life is going nowhere. So what should we talk about? The weather, the news? I wish him well, I don't hold a grudge anymore. I have a distanced view on his life now. I only see that he didn't stop drinking when he had a son, and didn't stop when he had another and didn't stop as they grew older, and didn't stop when his family left him and didn't stop in decades since, there's no reason to expect him to stop now, even as his body begins to fail. You are the average of the people you interact with most often. To talk with him would be to give him space in my head, to think about what he is thinking about and to think about what he thinks I might be thinking. For what purpose should I spend that mental effort? Why should I not rather spend it on my own life and the things I value, things that might bring the world forward? I wish him well. Though I don't know how he will be well. I know he would not want to see himself as dependent. I know he doesn't want me to feel sorry for him. And I know if I do talk with him, sorry is mostly what I will feel. I should tell him at least that. Not listen to him, not let him worry about tangling himself up addiction driven lies and delusions, just let him know that his son is sorry it all turned out this way. We're all lost, we're all human, we all make mistakes, and we do what we can with what little we have. Yours Manuel