The author lost his mother at eight years old. This devastating event marked his life with loneliness and a paralyzing fear of love—until forty years later, when a mysterious envelope revealed a truth that had been kept from him all along.
The book traces the wound of abandonment, that primal loss that shapes a life and leaves us afraid to love for fear of being abandoned again.
Should a child ever know the whole truth? Should a child have to bear such unbearable pain? Perhaps we can only move beyond our suffering by walking straight through it.
Can we find happiness without truth? When he opens the envelope, he discovers a secret he never truly sought—and that discovery upends everything he thought he knew about his parents, casting their memory in an entirely new light.
This is a book that speaks, with passion and self-deprecating wit, about feelings, love and solidarity, forgiveness—the things without which we cannot hope to live a full and authentic life. It does so through images that shift from powerful to tragic to tender to gently nostalgic, each one a thread in the larger tapestry of human connection.
R.M., 2012