There are moments that the words don’t reach
There is suffering too terrible to name
You hold your child as tight as you can
And push away the unimaginable
The moments when you’re in so deep
It feels easier to just swim down”-Lin-Manuel Miranda, Phillipa Soo, Original Broadway Cast of “Hamilton” & Renée Elise Goldsberry, “It’s Quiet Uptown” from the 2015 musical, Hamilton: An American Musical
I’m an uncle. I’m a teacher. I’m a big cousin. But I’m not a father. Not yet, anyway. However, I have so many friends who have been blessed to bring a child into the world. Unfortunately, life being what it is, I also have friends who have been burdened with the loss of their child. One of them told me that it was a result of bullying and it just made my blood boil. It also brought inspiration to the short story, The Burden of Parenthood.
A parent should never have to bury their child. It’s supposed to be the other way around. Even though it’s equally painful, it’s also natural. But for a parent to have to give up their child through death, I would never wish on anybody – not even my enemy. I don’t care how much I don’t like somebody. Kids are the single most important beings and they are a treasure.
Unfortunately, as I listened to “It’s Quiet Uptown” from the musical Hamilton, I was forced to accept that there are just some things that can’t be helped. Parents try to keep their kids close to them and protect them, but life doesn’t discriminate between sinners and saints. That’s what I wanted to convey in this story. There are just some things that you can’t protect your kid from.
I didn’t intend for the story to have two timelines. Originally, I wanted to be in a single room with the police and a confessed killer but I felt that I’ve done that kind of writing a bit too much for my life. I wanted to do something new and I realized that I haven’t done a dual timeline. So, that’s what I did. I made it so that I could have two parents with the same sorrow come together.
However, me being me, I took a much darker approach. Both of them are going through the imaginable and they’re going about it darkly. But one has already acted and another is preparing to act so it gave me a lot of wiggle room for my usual theme of duality. I wanted to really understand what goes through the mind of a justice-seeking killer and how they feel after the fact.
Now, I don’t condone the act of murder of any kind for any reason. But, my job as a writer, is to make my readers understand and see why they did what they did. I want my readers to say, “I can see why they did that.” It doesn’t make it right, but they can digest and accept the reasoning.
I don’t want to give anything away but I will say that this story was the hardest for me to write. Unlike Childhood Lost…and Found, a short story that had an acceptable ending, this one didn’t. This story had an ending that will have my readers thinking “Seriously?”. I like the ending but a few of my friends didn’t. But I’ll let you be the judge of that. And, with that, I hope you enjoy the story.
You can buy the book on Amazon. The link is here.
You can also learn about it on Goodreads. The link for it is here.
