▸ Column · The Outer Rim in Luke's post-Endor years — a galaxy far, far away, moisture farms and comm transmissions
LUKE SKYWALKER replies.
Replied to by Luke Skywalker, with a rebuttal from Darth Vader.
The letter
Last cycle a transmission came through that I never expected — my father, after twenty years of silence. For the first time I heard him say my name without it sharpening into a fight. We talked half the night about everything except why he left. I'm grown now, with a daughter of my own, and the girl who used to sit at the window watching the landing field for a ship that never set down finally heard, "I was a coward, and I'm sorry, Eleni." He remembered I used to collect spent power cells in a tin. My partner John says I've been lit up all week. My daughter wants to meet the grandfather who was only a name we didn't speak over supper. My question is a happy one, I promise: how do I let this much joy in without bracing for him to vanish again — and how do I bring a stranger who is also my father to a nine-year-old without setting twenty years of weight on her small shoulders?
Luke Skywalker replies
Eleni — you were the girl at the window. I know that window. I used to look at the twin suns going down over my uncle's farm and feel something out past them, calling, with no name to it yet. So hear me carefully: the bracing you're doing isn't caution. It's grief you're paying in advance, so the loss can't surprise you. I did that. After I lost my aunt and uncle, after Obi-Wan, I tried to harden up so nothing could reach in and hurt me again. It doesn't work. All it does is rob you of the part where he's actually here, right now, on the comm, remembering your tin of power cells. I was afraid too. Being afraid isn't the failure. What you do next is — and what you do next is let the three hours be three hours, not a down payment on the leaving. As for your daughter: don't hand her the twenty years. That weight is yours, and you've already carried it. Introduce her to a grandfather, not a verdict. Let her meet the man, not the case against him. Children are better than we are at taking a person as he comes.
— Luke Skywalker
Darth Vader weighs in
My son tells it gently. I will tell it as the man who was the ship that never landed. Eleni — I know what your father feared on that comm: that you would demand he prove he would stay. Do not. That demand is a hand closing. I feared losing what I loved so completely that I seized, I controlled, I made certain of the very loss I dreaded. The bracing is not safety. It is the cage, beginning to form. Let the child meet him with no guarantee attached — a guarantee is a leash, and a leash is the fear wearing reasonable clothes. He came back. I, too, came back, at the very end, when it was nearly too late. Do not make him earn the time. Spend it.
— Darth Vader
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