The Vow and the Silence

                                         My two children, when the time they lost their mother

The Vow and the Silence

I made a vow.
It wasn’t spoken in a temple or written on paper, but it was carved into the air between me and my wife as she was being led to the plane that would take her back to Illinois—
to the unknown, to her final days.

I said I would care for our children until they were ok on their own.

That vow was no small thing. It came from the marrow of love, made in grief’s long shadow. I have held it like a sacred stone, pressing it to my chest through years of change, through places and dreams and morning breakfasts of roti canai—three pieces, just in case. A father’s way of loving with foresight.

But lately I’ve asked myself:
When is enough enough, where caring is concerned?

Am I still keeping the vow… or am I holding on because I need to?
Is it still love… or has it become a habit of the heart I don’t know how to release?

Carl Jung said something about not caring—not in the cold sense, but in the deep, quiet way of letting things be what they are.
Of letting others face their own storms without stepping in.
Of loving without clinging.

And I wonder, where does that leave a father who promised?

My children are grown. They walk their own roads now. I see them make choices, some wise, some wild, but none mine to change.
I am no longer the fire they huddle near—but perhaps I am the ember they still carry in their chest.

The monastery still calls me.
Always has.
Not the stone-walled kind, perhaps, but the inner one—the retreat where silence is prayer, where I can lay down the burden of being needed.

But this vow... this care... has been part of my skin.

I wonder, do I need to care as much as they need to be cared for?
Has my identity wrapped itself so tightly around fatherhood that I fear who I’ll be when I step back?

And yet—perhaps stepping back is not breaking the vow.
Perhaps it is fulfilling it.

I said I’d care until they were ok on their own.
And “ok” doesn’t mean invincible. It means they now walk without falling to pieces.
They rise. They bruise. They learn.

My love doesn’t end if I grow silent.
My presence doesn’t vanish if I seek solitude.
The vow is still alive—just quieter now. Wiser.

Maybe love, in its most unconditional form, knows when to bow out,
when to become background music instead of the main song.

And maybe the last lesson I offer them is this:
That a man who has given everything can still follow his own calling.

And that peace isn’t found by holding on.
It arrives when we finally allow ourselves to let go.

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