Your birthdays were never an important event that you reveled in celebrating.  It was for the young, I believe you thought.  Perhaps it marked another year of triumph, for you had survived another year but not lived as you hoped.  So this is not a happy birthday to you my Farzin, because there is nothing happy about it, for you for me or anyone who loved you.  

It is a day to remember all that was good about you,  the love we shared, and the unspeakable darkness in our own lives, that we walked through together.   It is said that there aren’t enough days in the year or years in life.  Time is seen in the erosion of boulders by drops of water; it is capable of uncovering knowledge and can cause what we know today to become the unknown.  

Time seems to pass faster as we age, for we know that mortality is our fate.  For you time lingered much too long as you lived in dread of the devastating depression and downward spiral into hopelessness.  So you stopped time. 

A Letter to my Farzin, January 1, 2002

A note to myself, commemorating Farzin’s 66th birthday, I found folded in a book.

Four years later when Eshgheman turned 70, our families got together for a celebration. You were subdued, I was elated. It was a symptom of your illness, but sometimes I took it personally. Of course that was a mistake, but the years got harder.  Time took its toll on us.

At some point in 2014,  I wrote you a note.  It was a declaration of love but also a cry for help and for understanding.  I knew you so well, but I was disillusioned, even shattered by your limited understanding of me that time had neither deepened nor expanded.

A year before you took your life and ended time..