Last month, after the inauguration of our new president and vice president, I wrote President and Dr. Biden a letter. I posted it in an envelope I addressed by hand and hand-selected the stamp. I once worked as a summer congressional intern, answering constituents’ mail, so I know mailing a letter to the president and hoping it reaches his hands are akin to tossing a message in a bottle off my island shore and believing it will find its way to its intended recipient.
I once found a bottle on Rose Island, just off Aquidneck Island, with a message inside. I found the loved one of the person who had written it, after the person who’d scribbled the message in pencil on a shred of a brown paper bag had died.
So I do believe.
I am also conflicted. I am a journalist by training and by work in a long career. It twinges my journalist’s nerves, like a fly might signal a spider it’s landed in its web, to allow myself to risk coloring outside the lines of my old-school schooling.
I decided, I chose to embrace the fact that I am also a citizen and a human; and, President Joe Biden knows something about the grief I’m carrying, from the recent suffering and deaths of people I love and cherish, to the suffering and deaths I witnessed decades ago as a international photojournalist, covering conflict and its aftermath in the Middle East and Africa. The gut-shot baby who died in a dilapidated hospital in Mogadishu, with no family there because they’d all been killed. The starving girl who died in her mother’s fragile and famine-ravaged arms in Baidoa. The mother who wailed and wept and clawed the earth over her baby son’s fresh grave in Iraqi Kurdistan. The family members in Liberia who refused to release the body of their beloved, who was suspected of dying of Ebola, because the designated graveyard for the Ebola dead was far too far for them to visit.
When I wrote that first letter, I didn’t notice that I’d written it on a date that marked five months since my father had died.
When I sat down to write a second letter to President and Dr. Biden, it was after his speech and the moment of silence for the 500,000 Americans who had died during the COVID pandemic. Below are a few graphs from my one-page letter.
“We haven’t been able to hold a service or gather as a family to mourn and celebrate my father and my sister. It’s been such a grueling, devastating year: two bedside vigils, back-to-back, the deaths of two of our six family members in four months.
As you spoke, I turned out the lights in my house in Rhode Island. I lit two votive candles and listened to your words and heard your heart. When I heard the horns carry the melody of ‘Amazing Grace,’ I felt my sadness rise and my eyes well with quiet tears. My father loved ‘Amazing Grace.’ He was a man of deep faith and a public servant, as you are. My sister also loved ‘Amazing Grace;’ she was a big believer in grace.
In my quiet, dark living room, while you spoke of the 500,000 lives taken by COVID, I thought of my friend Robert, my father, John, and my sister, Karen. You offered my mother and me a space to place our sorrow, for a few moments…
Thank you, Mr. President and Dr. Biden, for leading with wisdom, empathy and heart.”
When I looked at the date on my letter, it was February 25, 2021, six months after my father died.
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