Dear Sam,
You're sleeping in the bedroom, a blanket thrown across the bare mattress. You're too little to understand anything that I'm going to say; you just know you have new friends, that you scream when they leave our house and go to find them, first thing, when you wake up in the morning.
Sam, I whisper and hum and sing to you every day that you were made a hero.
"Protector of the weak, champion of virtue, knight of the realm..." I sing-song it to you. I remind you that your strength will make you gentle, that your kindness will make you strong. That you'll find in people what is worth fighting for, even when they don't see it.
Someday, you will tell a friend that God put you in this hard place, you just don't know why yet. Someday someone will tell you, "I think it was for me."
Someday, Sam, you're going to meet the person you cannot save.
No reach of love, no word from you, no touch of your arm will bring them back.
They are worth it, and you will not give up, but you will know to the depths of you that you cannot save them. You can't make them want to live. It is their choice, and you can't take it from them. Someday, my Sam, my warrior, you will stand on a hill you cannot win just so there is someone standing on it. Someday you will love with everything you have and when you come up dry you'll stay there from pure, vicious stubbornness because if Satan takes this one, he doesn't do it without someone of heaven contesting the ground.
You'll find this weird, haunting peace that comes when you are not enough. You'll know you are a representative of Heaven, and Heaven weeps.
We can't win this, Sam. But we will stand here till all the hope is gone. She still might.
Keep crawling to doors and knocking on them. Keep screaming when people leave our house. Keep loving, Sam. You're still a baby warrior, but even still, don't give up. We will hold this hill together.
