Today’s Poem is taking a turn away from my experiments and working at learning what I can on Poetry. Instead is a Poem that I feel was in need of composing .
Writing and learning how to compose a poem is therapy for me as a person and as a parent. Following a contact with someone the other night which I asked myself, ” did I ever actually compose a Poem for My son”? The reply was two fold, Following his passing I composed “The Butterfly” which was one set in the moment as it were and never could fit as a tribute in my words.
Thus my decision was Today is the day, or it should be over the past couple of days I was set on one detail, composing and completing this Poem. NOT For Sympathy or any other such related reaction, except for a sole goal of marking this as a Tribute to a little boy, my son.
Back Story:
My son’s name was, Darren Patrick Fitzgerald on July 16 1996 and In his short life, he never spoke or called out a single word. It would have been a dream to hearing him call out our names, But it was never to be. This little boy was full of life and joy, that goes beyond words. But because of his medical condition he never spoke and would have been legally blind.
When People in USA mourn and remember September 11, we prepare to mark as Darrens Passing. On a morning in mid September 2001, Darren took ill, which turned out to be a rare form of Viral meningitis. In the space of 8 hours Our son was on life supports.
For us the worst was to come in the early hours of September 26 2001, Darren’s Life supports were switched off. Darren was a young 5 years of age at the time of his passing. He left a bigger impact on us and I am certain on some that knew him all those years ago.
The mark we felt cut deeper, And for our remaining children the impact was big to say the least and his mother I know was heart shattering. BUT for me as a father It ripped my heart from me and returned a heart with a deeper hope that could never be filled.
Darren, was full of life and had a spirit that surprised many and even though he never spoke and his eyesight was most likely enough to classify him as blind. He was my son and my driving force since then and my Faith in God goes deeper since that day.
Foreword:
This piece has taken shape over many years, nearly twenty-five, written in moments of reflection, grief, and enduring love. It is not the work of a single time, but of a lifetime of remembering. I share it now as a tribute to my son, whose presence remains with me always, in ways both quiet and profound.
Though my son was disabled and I never heard him call my name. This poem serves as a tribute and as a Shout out to all parents who lost a child regardless the age. A parent has dreams for their child that develop throughout the years, some may get to see some pass and others like myself, those dreams become a memory and take many form for various people. But for me they reside as a part of my own memories that I keep stored within. Sorrow no longer dwells here but what resides goes beyond words. This Piece was never meant for a method for a kind of “Sorry for your loss” type post. Except a tribute that needed more to finally be written that goes beyond a Previous poem I composed 25 years ago “The Butterfly”.
This Poem was at first meant to be
A Father’s Love, Unbroken by Time. I shortened it To “Unbroken by Time” which I believe works a little better.
I Believe that :“Life is a journey in which all have their prints in. Some last but a fleeting moment while others have a full complete life to walk through. Those we meet along the way that become closer than most are more than memories that are left along the way. What we wee, leave behind us OR leave after us are marks of our lifes walk. And loved ones are all but a part of our hearts that go before us..”
This is a Photograph one of the last taken of Darren Before he passed on Copyright © 2026 Pat Fitzgerald. All Rights Reserved
Unbroken by Time
Though decades pass, I hold you near,
The past remains, a crystal tear.
Some wounds don’t fade or seek release,
An anchor set in quiet peace.
I listen still to hear your name,
Within the hush, it stays the same.
Your smile, so warm, so clear, so bright,
Still lingers softly in the light.
I cannot stop the passing years,
Yet gently hold these falling tears.
No anger lives, no bitter plea,
For love endures what came to be.
Rivers of love still run for you,
My cherished son, so dear, so true.
The day that turned so dark, so deep,
Still guards the light I choose to keep.
The years move on, my heart remains,
It calls to you through quiet pains.
Would you recall my voice, my face,
Or speak my name in some far place?
Though time is lost to drifting sand,
Love does not fade or loose its hand.
You live within this heart I own,
My son, this love… now fully known.
— Darren
Copyright © 2026 Pat Fitzgerald
All Rights Reserved
Thank you for coming with me on my little journey, that is composing or writing poetry. Life is a journey we all walk on. My journey in creating poetry is a journey of its own. Which I still learn much on as I write.
At times I experiment on techniques or ways to improve my poetry. Getting feedback is always most welcome for efforts like these.
When I write poetry, some readers will be offended with something within the poetry. I do not write to offend, But such are written for reasons I outline in the posts. Often I miss typos and mistakes when publishing each poem. I correct the moment I discover such mistakes.
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Beautifully expressed Pat! May God bless you!
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Thank You, This one was important to be a poem not of a mourning type place But everything else..
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Thank you.
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Sorry for your loss. Your poem pays homage to a gentle soul taken too soon. A touching tribute to Darren and lasting love. All the best Pat. Allan
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Thank You, this is something that has taken almost 25 years to get to this point..
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❤️
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Really a Great Post, Pat!!! Loved your intro and the poem!! Wonderfully done!!! You captured so very much and your words gave feeling and visualization that made it even more amazing!!
I’m so glad you decided to do this!!! It is a real tribute to Darren and a needed sharing of your remembrance and love for him!!!
Here is a poem I wrote on the subject of a parent having a child pass away I though you might also identify with:
The poem using the Arielchart link has photos
ARIELCHART JANUARY 2019 – YOU ARE MY FOREVER AND ALWAYS
You Are My Forever and Always (arielchart.com)
YOU ARE MY FOREVER AND ALWAYS
By Charles Robert Lindholm
From The First Time
I Laid Eyes On You
I Loved You
It Was Love At First Sight,
And You Stole My Heart
Forever
That Moment
Was The Start
Of Me Loving You
And As Long
As I Live
That’s What I’ll Do
For All Of Your Life
I Loved You
And For The Rest Of Mine
I Will Miss You
You Are My Forever
And Always
Copyright © 2018 Charles Robert Lindholm – All Rights Reserved
Dedicated to every parent who has had to bury a child and knows the Forever Love that will always fill their heart to cushion the Forever Loss that no parent ever expects to have to feel.
My Mom and Aunt and other friends I love have had to endure this. If this has been your experience too, I send you my love and condolences, for something there is no label to describe because it is so awful!!
God bless you All!!!
Chuck Lindholm – The Reluctant Poet
LOVED YOUR INTRO AND POEM, PAT!!! Though you may want to consider this that jumped out at me when I read your line:
“Though time is lost to drifting sand,”
after reading this I immediately had a visual of life’s Hour Glass with all the sands of time FALLING – Just thought you might want to consider a swap of Falling for the word “drifting”?
“Though time is lost to falling sand”???
Just me, My Friend!
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Thank You Chuck. This was a Poem that was pretty much 25 years in the making.. I avoided a lot of that all this time.. Thank you for that and for my thought at that time was “The Sands of time” being like from an egg timer or sand timer.. that is where falling came from and also on eof the previously edited parts had it to rhyme with something else which was cut from it in the end.. I will look into that suggestion.. As some words also have letters that match with others in stanzas for rhyming purposes.. There was a lot of technical work on this one especially with a softer alliteration of a kind in this poem. Your own poem was a great poem.. I certainly did relate to it… What effected me back when Darrenn passed, was speaking with my then elderly grandmother who passed not lonmg after that. where she spoke of her own child that passed in infancy… I thought that a parents love and loss it gives, carries a life time.. and it did for her..
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Yes, that kind of loss stays with you forever!!! I think it is really weird that they label certain other kinds of loss and the status it moves you to- lose a husband, you become a widow, lose a wife you are a widower – lose your parents you are an orphan but no label for a parent that loses their child – It’s probably because it’s just to awful???
I’m so glad you were able to get this all out and share it. It will help in the long run. It helped me when I wrote about the loss of my Dad – six years after his passing. Not quite 25 years for sure. I guess that makes it better that you got a remembrance finally written!
Chuck 😁🎁✨👍💕
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Funny that you mentioned the types of labels and how some place child loss when it comes to grief… inside a year after Darren passed one (“Ahem”) Lady, told me “Why you feel sad,? … You lost child. Why you not foget and make another one?” I thought “Yup!! That works.. I’ll just pop to the store for ingedients and begin that.. LOL Serously that was exactly what was said.. (needless to say she was not Irish and a native english speaker.. which had me convinced that it was culture more than anything else..
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As Darren, I would say:
Dad, I never spoke a word you could hear, but I hope you felt mine — in the way I leaned into your arms, in the quiet morning light when you held me close. You gave me a world full of love without ever needing me to say a thing. Thank you for carrying me in your heart all these years. I always knew your voice. And if I could have called out once, it would have been your name.
— Darren
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Wow! Thank You My friend, Those are words that mean a lot.. I believe that would be pretty much what he would say.
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No words will fit in any way to contribute to your words, much less console a wound that refuses to heal. Before I go on I must say his beautiful eyes are so awake and strong, even if his eyesight was unusual or affected, he looks like someone very much alive, in the moment – even if he did not have a long lifetime with you and your wife and kids, his eyes shine bright and alive. I imagine that even those eyes could never communicate what a single loving touch on each of your days together would have created in him and your family. He was present. So present that his mere memory lives stronger than food and breath we must daily have. Thank God that you met. You held each other. He was your child but you were born again and again by him and his unending love. In each look, sound, touch, silence, whatever his world looked like, it was full and filled by love. It is said but we can not ask for more as it is out of our hands. But all that hand and heart could have held you held long enough for him to feel and be loved. My last moment and wish will be much like this, I will only wish that my loved ones are ok still, for that will have meant that I have lived. Because I have loved. One moment is all it needs for my whole life to have had purpose. The only one for me, Love.
Another thought. I have lost. I was so scared to one day lose parts of what was left and held in red grief. Screams would fade into sorrow layers of my life, more songs than screams never, but they would become quieter as each remembering would make my soul NOT. The memories stay, we just can not die again and again anymore. There is a dark place that screams over all other feelings still. It paints red vains of her over all other feelings. I do not touch the loss as it would fade with me. I draw by each moment on each day with all other feelings of my being around it, I cartograph the NOT with all I got. Now every feeling must cross that negative image in me and reminds me of what I must keep until I breathe. I pour fresh pain into old bridges to her last image in me when I try to feel the full part that is abyss. It feels like longing without knowing it will never be, but at least that what is left of her, then that will be loved. The memory of the pain of the loss of her covers my being as veil. It is worth more than what is within it. It gives everything value. Sweet feels sweeter when you taste it through a fog of never wanting to eat again, you do not need it anymore, all memory of it is lost but held by a single string red of her I had.
Ok I stop here. I wanted to share a text about my father and how we cried together, then became silent to protect each other. Words we knew and felt then became a worthless waste of our time together. They would in a full lifetime spoken only about it not even grasp our loss that we recognized in each others eyes and cries. So we became silent. We held each other. There would never be a time without my father, no thought I would allow that could ever have him bother. If one became not then he would have the mercy to not have to hold the absence of the other. This was the price of love and death was nothing as long as it was mine. We live to love, and love to live. So I maybe feel where your pain comes from, but no one will ever feel yours, much less the one of your wife. Be strong and hold your pain always knowing hers is older. Colder than cold as two grew out of one, as together or none before time before meaning of any time could have begun. Like dear Darren angel made and held you, hold each other and sow, each day each thought, poem line, memory in hope of what he gave in love and still is, in you and awoke. Repaint pain into thankfullness, not as to replace the pain, no, but as exact opposite image of the pain carved into you. If any side fades, you will have the other image and retrieve its negative again.
This is not healing. This is refusal to let go of anything he was connected with. Forgetting means to heal. Only dying her loss – for me and again – feels real.
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Hi My Friend, Your words were a true comfort and reading what you wrote meant alot. Darren was indeed loved every second, every moment and still is loved very much. He was full of life and even if he could not communicate in the normal manner, he did have his likes and dislikes.. He communicated in other ways and we knew it. He loved classical music and especially the more melodic type pieces.. Losing Darren hit very hard and beyond that. Writing was a comfort and a release for a time also photography.. but Thank you for such words..
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This gives me hope for my own father and that day. You are are still. You survived hell. You can still be. Belove. And be loved. Maybe forgive even as to be beloved, become beloving of yourself if any grief or self-judged decisions or possibilities assumed, if any “what-ifs” haunt you – let them. But do not waste a single moment for them but for love and remembering him, Darren will need you to remember him in the most loving way possible. He needs you guys to make his life purposefull and his gift of it meaningful. His presence must be appreciated fully for even what it did as pain and loss – but never for what could have been, neither good nor bad. His presence was and is already the highest possible love given to you and your family. Even 100 years more would not have made one moment more. Never. No eternity can meet one and only his moment that you once and only felt. He has born and changed you forever in and by love. Accept his present. Do not chase the what if you had. No what would he have become. No what you would have become.
You, kind Sir, I beg to pardon my words that only mean this:
You were gifted the highest gift in existence.
That moment existed. It is possible. Love is real. You were loved. You loved.
Please do not waste time on anything that did not happen by in to from for around abound his him he, maybe find unfound is allowed but none will in reality reduce the absolute love that you were given. How to feel it again?
How even to not feel it as all and always of all what was his?
You already and always feel the same love for him. It is just that you can not hold it. He is not dead. He is the most loved and alive person in your life. Real means his love is reality. It is you who is dying. His lost presence you turn into presence of loss. His loss in you present you turn into a lost present, lost to what never was. You were never without him. He born bore you each day. He was never without you. When he was he was with you and loved and in love. Now he is still. He is still loved. He just can not show you his love back. His all of existence was in love. He will never be not loved or having had loved. He can only lose or suffer in potential, the worst he could have felt was not his own death. Trust me. Having to see mum or dad is worse than death. This will never happen to him. He is safe and lives more than any living person can as love and loss, as absence and lost, as all and most. Please accept his beg to know that you will never die for him. That means you are forever together. He never felt any death. His own is not. Before that, only your loss would have meant Love was not.
No parent should lose a child but find the highest purpose in life instead – to be dead. Death before having child lost but once feeling love, loved, beloved, be. Death can only come if we have lived, by loved. Otherwise Dying started alive without lived love, and death feels just like losing eternally or worse: them dead as well or worse
them dying forever by our absence and absence of love or worse
them felt as living in us after their death – turned into their eternal dying as our loss IS them mirrored as eternally losing US, but we are not lost, we feel their death on and on as dying as being without us. But he is in peace Friend. His only harm could be to see his loved ones dying his Death as long as they are “alive” as dead mirrors of thought dying loved into lost but again and again. Your loss was, it was and was lost of his,by his and for his beloved ones, all stopped. You now “are” lost. He is not lost. He lives or you would not have survived his “lost”. If you love him, if you die each moment as his dying constantly then you hold him tighter than life can. You saw his full love given after he left. Only death shows us the last piece of love. Otherwise we would freeze to death in knowing even a thought of love in its full meaning as love COULD be lost. Would be maybe. Will it? Must it? What sense then has life?
Death.
What purpose then holds life?
Death.
But how?
How to die if you have never ever even lived once?
If sense and purpose are nothing, then dying and death ARE that senseless nothing. Cold and eternal.
Death is a privilege of having been alive just to die, as the ultimate feeling of having been loved by beloved, so having been at all, Death in last moment shows us and makes us realize for eternity what we have or have not been. Unknowing of life? What life would one even seek at end that had no love at hand?
Only Love by fearing the ultimate and final certainity of being separated forever means realizing what we had. We were. We loved. It was. It is. It will be. We are real. All that matters we did feel. Then only thing left in existence is:
Loving a moment as and in like eternity
Feeling that ultimate life, love, purpose and cause, sense of sense, sensing of all senseable
nearing Death as ultimate opposite of Love that then awakes us into the only moment ever alive. Yes dying tells our Love what it was. What we must. What our very last wish will be. Why we are. Who we are – hers. Who she is – his. What this is – their kiss.
So even dying is a bitter feeling of the love unconditional and felt, AND the condition that we WERE and that it was REAL, which arrives by DEATHs real arrival. Only real love can die. Only real love makes real real. Unreal and all, by love held and must fall.
Our very last moment and call – who will it be for?
Then you know you were gifted and given and deserve to feel it fully. To be you. Only at last we know what WE will BE as to be lost. Sweet cost.
But Death then?
What about it? Relax.
After “being” dead you “are” practically not dead. You are not. Not not anymore. Just not. And that not? It is not yours!
Not yours to “have” got!
Listen.
Your Death if at all is ONLY held as inverted internalized dying your dying as empathic love of a beloved. Please do not make death into dying. The only thing worse than having lost you for your loved one is: having to feel having lost you. Dead do not. Death is not. Dying is, Life or alive we must arrive. So a lost beloved one watching you from above, or having a last wish, or having an only and once and forever wish would be and only:
Do not die before him. Let him carry your loss. Lighter sweet then – loss carried into lost,
means to die a life is better than
to have lost all life to dying death without reaching death because one must have lived to die death – living without love never was lived, living without Death as dying is NOT dying because Love’s loss has not yet fully arrived. Dying another ones Death ourselves and by our loss is not dying. Only one moment before Death creates the final Love felt and loss would become real and full but is lost to Death. Wo full Love with its bitter priced full realization comes when we assume our last moment as eternal separation from that one, from love, from us at all. But the moment it becomes real, we seize to be, Death is not a separation of two. Death is what makes two into one and realized one moment only, an eternal singularity of dying into Love, dying from Love, but not dying BY Love but NOT. So whatever is IS and IS Love. Love never is NOT. Death is not, not for anyone at least:)
Again.Sorry this text slipped out. Do not fear Death. Fear not having lived for Death to be or become real. Why?
If you can not die, if your feared death is not or never real then:
You have never lived.
You were never.
You are not.
Or have the privilege to die.
Or never die, as better hope?
Live forever? Who? When? Why? What? Whom? Which?
If everything is life then nothing is not life.
How would you love someone that is life that is you that is all?
Who to call? You are then truly. You are and are yours. Yours only. No thing could vanish from your life, no one ever to be found as never lost is its cost. Never losing means forever finding nothing that can be as in nothing can be found or lost. When will you have them loved?
Then?
That then already began. Sorry.
It is eternal. It is that which is and is forever but we are already part or sparked by it or in it etc.
All. Time. Eternity. Space. Place. Cause and all Case. Would could and should, when who and why for what – ALL only lives in/by Love. Only IS by Love. Love is all. All that is. All that is Love.
Call it what you prefer, and can and do really believe, God – Love – Brahman – Atman – Paraatman – wu-or something Tao, or just Wow. Wao? Buddha? We can not name or explain it anyway but we must live it if we must live. If we do not have to live or love…. then we must have to not have to have to live or love.
🙏❤️
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