leverage kid death

middle-age American living in New Jersey near the Lincoln Tunnel «« There are some advantages to having kid die when he or she is still a kid.  On the occasion of my wife and I playing Adam in chess, I am recalling and telling my wife how my late son was a great chess player, and nothing can prove me wrong.  Any parent lives with the fear that their son(s) or daughter(s) will have a miserable lives and not achieve in any way that reflects their son’s or daughter’s potential, but I know longer have that fear with my late son, David.  He died as those dreams for him were beginning to take shape, but nothing will force me to reconcile oversized dreams against reality.  The nuance of death/chess/wife conversations also included me describing teaching my late son, David, how to play chess.  Very soon after he learned how the pieces move he beat me, and to show me it was not luck he beat me in a series of games that followed.  Cool, he’s good, I thought.  With one exception I never beat him again.  Ironic that his only loss to me after his first win could only be credited to him being brain dead (he was later brain dead before his death), because a player with his abilities would not lose so early in a game to a player with my abilities.  He expanded slightly and played a kid, who’s now a man, Dylan, but Dylan avoided loss, so his one defeat against my late son, David, was his final match against David.  I trust Dylan’s account of these events would differ, but only my late son could present a credible account of my story, and he’s dead, so my version lives unreconciled with reality – not bad.  I moved away from my late son in his early teenage years, and years later I returned for ceremonies placing his body in its final resting place, Carlisle, Pennsylvania, so in the years I was separated from him I don’t know where he went with his chess playing.  He followed a pattern in his final years to fight-all-things-dad, but chess was adopted by him, and it became his game much more than it was ever mine, so he would not have abstained on principle.  If some event put me in the company of people who knew him in those years, and no one knew of him playing chess, then I could still live with the fantasy that he played people online.  No one, no event, no story present or absent can ruin my fantasy.  I have not allowed my fantasy to run away as if I were the father of the next Bobby Fisher, but I can be sure he was good, and the world will never know how good he was.  The truth of my late son’s, David’s, chess playing went with David to his grave, and I am left with a unchallenged and unchallengeable version that will live with me until my death — amen, assalam alaikum, mazel tov  »» about me, 201-490-9659, we come in peace, nearlincoln@hotmail.com

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