Living For The Love Of Him

A Writer Explains How The Birth Of His Son Changed His Thoughts On His Mortality.

- Jermaine Spradley

Charles Dickens once penned, “In the little world, in which children have their existence, whosoever brings them up, there is nothing more finely perceived or finely felt as injustice.”

I didn’t grow up with my father, and it was a finely felt injustice. Mine isn’t the story of a father who left or who was never there for his son; my father loved me dearly, but he joined the ancestors when I was just 11.

At 33, I’ve lived more years without my dad than I did with him. Still, sometimes when the sun is at my back at just the right angle and I catch a glimpse of my shadow’s gait in front of me, I see him and it scares me. It scares me because, aside from distant memories that grow more difficult to grasp with each day that passes, his likeness in my own shadow is all I have left of him. It scares me because I am now the father of this beautiful little boy, and I want him to have more than that of me.