Jared - 51

Dear Sweet Mamma

You left at 1:30 in the morning, two hours after my birthday.

I know the exact time because it split my life cleanly in two. Before and after. What I was carrying unknowingly, and what I could no longer avoid. I remember the stillness that followed, the strange quiet that settled into the room and into me. My body knew before my mind caught up.

At 3:30 a.m., you came to me.

I didn’t imagine it. I wasn’t dreaming. You woke me. You were there as a golden essence, warm, unmistakable, intimate. Not words exactly, but a presence so clear it rearranged me from the inside. Something entered me in that moment. Strength without hardness. Love without condition. A knowing that I would have to keep living, but not the way I had been.

Before you passed, I was lost.

Not in a way that always showed. I was still running a business. Still showing up. Still convincing people, and myself, that I had things under control. But inside, I was exhausted and ashamed of how far I’d drifted from the boy I once was. At night, I drank tequila straight from the bottle. I used drugs to numb what I didn’t know how to name, the grief, the pressure, the fear of having failed at the very things that mattered most.

I wasn’t trying to disappear.
I just didn’t know how to stay.

My work consumed me. I told myself I was building something for my family, but the cost was higher than I admitted. The business fractured my home. And when trust broke down with my children’s mother, the ground beneath all of us became unstable. The relationship with my kids suffered in ways that still ache. Not because I didn’t love them, but because love alone doesn’t repair rupture.

That truth is hard to carry.

When you died, the ways I had been coping stopped working. The distractions fell apart. The numbing failed. Grief stripped everything back to what was real. I was forced to sit with myself, with guilt, with fear, with the consequences of choices I had made while trying to outrun pain.

There were nights I didn’t sleep. Mornings where I didn’t recognize the man in the mirror, but knew I was responsible for him anyway. I felt shame for how far I had strayed, and fear that I might never find my way back, to my kids, to myself, to something resembling home.

And yet, threaded through that darkness, there was you.

Not as memory, but as presence. As something steady that didn’t judge or rush me. I began to understand that whatever came to me at 3:30 a.m. wasn’t meant to save me from my life. It was meant to call me back into it. Fully. Honestly. Without anesthesia.

Honestly. Without anesthesia.

I started sitting with the pain instead of drowning it. Listening instead of fixing. Feeling instead of performing. I began to see how much of my life had been driven by fear, fear of not being enough, fear of losing love, fear of slowing down and facing what I had avoided.

Those fears haven’t vanished. I still feel traces of guilt. Still catch myself questioning whether I can repair what was broken. But something fundamental has shifted. I no longer abandon myself when things get hard. I stay.

I’m learning how to show up differently now, imperfect, accountable, present. I’m rebuilding trust where I can, especially with my children. The road back hasn’t been clean or quick, but it’s real. Every step forward feels earned, not forced.

There is something guiding me. I don’t know what name to give it. God. Universal energy. Love itself. What I know is that it doesn’t shame me. It doesn’t punish me. It carries me. And I believe that guidance began with you.

Your passing didn’t destroy me. It initiated me.

It cracked me open slowly, patiently, until I could no longer live half-present in my own life. I am becoming a man who feels, who tells the truth, who understands that strength and tenderness are not opposites. I’m still learning. Still human. But I am no longer lost in the same way.

If I could speak to you now, I would tell you this:

I’m coming home.
Not perfectly. Not all at once. But honestly.

And I would promise you that what you gave me, your quiet strength, your love, your endurance, I’m carrying it forward. For my children. For the men who don’t yet have language for their pain. For the boy in me who needed gentleness long before he knew how to ask for it.

I hope you can feel that.

I love you, Mom.

Always.

Jare bear

Music - Jared’s music choices during our photo session included Chantress Seba, John Legend, and Estes Tonne.