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RAISE UP YOUNG MAN

If you remember, you remember. This guy.

I still don’t have a great answer for this one. Nothing singular, I suppose, though I do have a loose collection of imperatives.

On that list is something I won’t really be able to describe without sounding grandiose. You’ll have to forgive me this, or make a deal to forgive me once I’ve forgiven myself for the way this sounds:

I want to say great things to people. I want to look them in the eye and put my hands on their shoulders and tell them things that will build them up, things they can come back to on some dark night of the soul and extract some small measures of sustenance and belief.

This is a repayment mission, to be sure. On one hip I carry an imaginary messenger’s bag full of those sorts of buoys—the moments I can’t forget, the moments I won’t forget, the moments when someone took their time to share a belief in me or a blessed hope for my future. These are the gifts I’ve received, freely but with unspoken conditions: terms that indicate their presence is to be paid forward.

(You can probably guess what’s on the other shoulder, by the way. It looks kind of like a chip. To everything, turn turn turn…)

A few weeks after my mom passed in late 2024, I took a drive over to the hospital where she’d had all of her oncology appointments and cancer-related treatments and tests since moving into an assisted-living closer to us.

There was a young man at the valet station, we’ll call him D, of whom my mom was particularly fond. I would drop her off at the curb and he’d help her out of the car and talk with her while I parked and walked back over to bring her up. He was, and I’m sure still is, central casting for sweet, gentle young man: tall if ever so slightly ungainly, messy hair, glasses, and the smile of a fourteen year old kid: big, hopeful, and in spite of its surroundings, as yet undimmed by life.

It’s hard to write this but it’s true. My mom and I did not have the easiest relationship, particularly during her illness. We both did our best, but things were difficult and sometimes those car rides were rough. In a lot of ways, probably some pretty deep ones, I think D. represented the kind of boy my mom may have wished she had in the driver’s seat next to her on many of those mornings—unencumbered by fear, resentment, and anxiety, and fully present in the moment as abstract, pure benevolence. He was sweet and he was kind to her, and I was a fucking mess most of the time.

But on that morning after her passing, I did my best again. I parked, walked up to D. at the valet station and told him that my mom had passed peacefully a few weeks ago. God bless this sweet kid, his shoulders dropped and sagged into his sorrow, tearing up telling me how much he’d enjoyed spending those short moments with my mom and how sweet she was to him.

And then I paid it forward. I put my hands on his shoulders and said “raise up young man.” These words didn’t come from me. I’ve never said anything like that in my life.

”You were kind to her, and she adored you,” I finished, and held his shoulders up again. “Stand tall, D. You were wonderful to her.” Some of those were my words, but there again, some of them were on loan from something far bigger than my desiccated little shit brain out there on the curb.

I choose to believe these things happen like I’ve come to believe most creation does. You are the conduit. Your charge is simply that of openness, aperture to whatever better angels live in our collective, and you pass those thoughts along prayerfully so that someone can stand taller on your knotted hands in that moment, and then on installment for the rest of their days.

To those who have paid me that kindness: I thank you and will honor you and pay this forward for the rest of mine.