"ELEVEN YEARS - IN CONVERSATION

ELEVEN YEARS... QUE SERA, SERA

Life has a certain kind of nerve, Ossie.

It hasn’t paused for you, the provocateur—the agent for change. It hasn’t slowed down since you stopped writing about the "Spirit" and the "Uncertainty" of being human. It just keeps recording, adding pages to a book you aren’t here to read.

Eleven years.

That’s a long time to be taught how to live with your absence. I’ve become an expert at it now, though the silence feels different than it used to. We were never terribly close in the everyday sense; months would pass between our conversations. But when we did speak, it was for hours—a deep exchange that made the distance irrelevant.

I still think about you in the Warrior Games, representing Team Navy and the Coast Guard. Stage 4 Nasopharyngeal cancer was attacking the base of your brain, but you were still out there on that bike, pedalling through the thick of the battle. It was your therapy. And when the weakness threatened to pull you back, your brothers ensured you crossed that line. They carried you when you couldn’t carry yourself.

The ache is doubled because I know you’ve got your mama there with you now. Tantie Jacqueline was part of my foundation; she gave me hope when hopelessness had free reign over my psyche. I think about how close she and my mama were—the two of them, the oldest and the next in line, left to navigate the world when their own mother died young. Your mama was only 15 and mine just 10 when they lost her, forced to survive my grandfather’s ways together.

That bond never broke. Sure, life interrupted, disrupted, sidelined, and interfered, but it didn't deal a death blow. Like a willow tree, it stood the test of time and all that life had to throw at it. My mom was there every day, talking for hours before heading to her own shift in the hospital. She’s 82 now, but at 75, she was still right there in the wards while people dropped like flies.

When your mama took her final bow, your sister was the one right there by her side. They were incredible together—like butter on toast. I’m just grateful your mama was spared that isolated "new reality" and had that kind of love with her at the end.

There’s no chaser for this reality, Ossie. No honey to mellow the bitter taste of these years.

Your son is a man now, eighteen or nineteen, walking in a world of his own. It’s a bitter dose to swallow—that a man who was an agent for change, a man raised by a woman of such indomitable hope, has a legacy that exists in the quiet.

I just keep the light on here, witnessing the march and remembering you and your mama. You both understood that the spirit has to keep pedalling, even when the finish line is out of sight.

The record is still open, but for now, I’m just living with the habit of you not being here.

Que sera, sera.
Sera, sera.

On Angel Duty:

11 years, 2 months, 9 days, 20 hours, 32 minutes

4085 days, 20 hours, 32 minutes

353,017,953 seconds

5,883,632 minutes

98,060 hours

4085 days

583 weeks

1119.18% of a common year (365 days)