He didnt need waking, his alarm always was there to get him up in time for work. I had made my cuppa and sat in bed for at least an hour before I walked in on that Saturday, one year ago.
As I wake this morning I hear the first line of a potential poem, “My son died, one year ago today”. But then I think of the words of David in Psalm 90:
The length of our days is seventy years—
or eighty, if we have the strength;
yet their span is but trouble and sorrow,
for they quickly pass, and we fly away.
Mike “flew away” during the early hours of that Saturday morning. I have tried and tried to find a poem that mike recited when he was about 11 and it was about a “thinking bird”. It so typified him. I remember over the days after his death a feeling that “he had morphed” or “gone through the metamorphasis process”.
John says in chapter 8 verse 36, “if the Son sets you free, then you are truly free”. Can you picture a small bird in a cage, contained and constrained by that “body”. A song Mike liked and made a video to was News Boys “I am Free”. He used a web camera and filmed himself jumping and waving his hands, he was only about 14 at the time. It was so nice to watch this boy who seemed so often “trapped by the framework he was born in”, to be un inhibited and express his “freedom” through this simple action of waving his hands and jumping.
One year ago I did not walk in and find a dead body, I walked in and found a fragile bird that had been released to fly and become what his maker had origionally intended for him.
Love you Mike and miss you heaps buddy, but so happy to know “you are free”, Dad.