▸ Column · The Star Wars galaxy, in the years following the fall of the Galactic Empire — somewhere among the ordinary lives lived between the history-making events.
LUKE SKYWALKER replies.
Replied to by Luke Skywalker, with a rebuttal from Darth Vader.
The letter
Three weeks ago my father Anwar sent a handwritten message — just my name in shaky script and a comm frequency — the first contact in twenty years, since he walked out when I was fourteen. I'd spent two decades telling myself I was past caring. Then I called him from a landing dock outside a supply depot, and we talked for nearly two hours about almost nothing: his bad knee, the cantina on Corellia he still goes to, a Loth-cat named Pickles he adopted last spring. Neither of us mentioned the silence. Somehow that felt exactly right. My wife Lottie wept when I came back inside — happy and worried both. I know there's a harder conversation still ahead. But right now I feel lighter than I have in years — am I foolish to let myself be this grateful before we've actually dealt with anything?
Luke Skywalker replies
No. You're not foolish. That lighter feeling is the realest thing in this whole letter.
I was told — by people who loved me and had good reasons — that my father was gone, that there was nothing left in him worth reaching for. They were wrong, and I almost listened. What I've learned is that some people come back not with speeches but with very careful small things: a shaky comm frequency, ninety minutes about a bad knee and a Loth-cat. That's not nothing. That's as much as some people know how to offer.
Your wife Lottie is afraid because she loves you and she remembers who paid for the silence. She's not wrong to carry that. But fear of being hurt again and a signal to stay closed — those aren't the same thing, and I know the difference from the inside. I felt the anger and the fear, and I threw away the weapon the fear wanted me to use. I've never once regretted it.
The harder conversation is out there waiting, and you'll feel when it's time. Right now the gratitude doesn't have to earn itself by suffering first. Ninety minutes about a rescued Loth-cat is a door cracked open, and it counts. Don't let anyone — including the part of you that thinks hoping makes you a fool — convince you that it doesn't.
— Luke Skywalker
Darth Vader weighs in
My son will tell you the comfortable silence was exactly right. He would say that — he was never the one carrying the debt.
I am the man who sent that card. Not your father precisely, but I know the shape of the gesture. Two decades of nothing, then a comm frequency in shaky script, because the real accounting is unbearable and a Loth-cat named Pickles is not. I told myself that was waiting for the right moment. It was cowardice wearing the costume of care.
Your gratitude is real. The lighter feeling is true. But notice what lifted the weight: not an apology. A card. Ninety minutes of nothing that cost him nothing.
Luke won't name this because from where he stood, I came back in the end. What he cannot tell you — what I could never make him understand — is what I was protecting myself from in every comfortable silence before that.
Do not wait for your father to find his courage. Name the thing yourself. The gratitude is not foolish. The patience is.
— Darth Vader
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