Letters from Josh

I have been meaning to post the letters I received from Josh while he was incarcerated but every time I unpack them and read them, I have lost most of my motivation to share some of my last memories of him. I think he deserves to be remembered, so in some small way, this may help.

I received deployment orders to the Persian Gulf while on Christmas leave in 2002. My ship deployed on January 6th, 2003 while Josh was still incarcerated.

Jan. 14th:

Hi Sis! I hope you are having a smooth ride in all accounts. I hope you will return soon. I miss you.
Thank you for helping me through the last year. Without you I would have had no one to keep me going at all. I owe you and your family all my respect and love. I am proud of you and I am glad you could organize your life and seek happiness. I have not gotten myself through my shit yet. I don't know if I can but I will try for you. I owe you that. This experience has seriously fucked me up though. I hope I don't violate probation/parole. I really hope you are not out long. If you are I hope you can adjust and think of those of us who love you. You have turned out to be a very compassionate woman and I love you for it. I'm still messed up in the head but I hope I can stabilize. I want to mail this out today, I just thought you might like to get mail on the ship. I like to get it here.
I love you, Josh.


Comments

Post a Comment

Popular posts from this blog

Where Would I be?

Where would I be....if I had finished my Ph.D at Indiana University? For some reason this is what I woke up thinking about this morning. I rarely dwell on anything in my past, especially things I could not control, but, with the changes that have happened with how we communicate with others, being mostly through social media, what used to be covert in person behavior, has become more overt and easier to connect with motive. We believe that people do not pay attention to our digital behavior, but the truth is for the attentive, those behaviors are so much more obvious than they would be based on in person conversations and second hand conversations-which are gossip to most of us and untrustworthy of any type of judgement. For example, I once had a boss who for the first two years I worked for her, hid her raging narcissism from me. She never yelled while I was around and did everything she could to make me feel valued-I should have noticed she was overcompensating, but alas, I wanted ...
Read more

Change a Mind, Save a Life.

Image
The implications of our influence on the people in our lives is more far reaching than we comprehend. My brother Josh was diagnosed with schizophrenia when he was 19; I will never forget the exact question he asked me as we were walking back to our apartment in South Miami, "Do you ever hear voices? Well actually it's more like a growl." That moment in my life was one of those times when the pit of my stomach sank. I had always protected my brother and I felt completely helpless and lost. As his big sister, I felt guilty that he was the one with the predisposition for mental illness. I spent years questioning what was so different about us that he had to go through the experience and I didn't. I blamed my mother and the years of "ups and downs" we experienced while her bipolar disorder went untreated. I blamed my mother's upbringing for her illness, and eventually decided that there was no one specific individual to blame, nor did it matter. What was imp...
Read more