A Beautiful Boy

13 December 2010
Chennai, India

Dear David

I never will possibly understand what you could have been through over the years, often battling overwhelming odds to ardently shelter your loved one from a destructive force that is almost always all permeating in the mind and the body!

I began reading your account 'Beautiful Boy: A Father's Journey Through His Son's Addiction' this past weekend and I must tell you how touched I am. One cannot readily imagine the situation of a parent, or a child, who is faced with a situation such as yours, except wonder how telling it would be on the strength of the family to pull through another day, as if that were perhaps the most arduous of tasks ever.

Besides, dealing with a feeling of guilt while maintaining stoic disposition of wanting to control the situation, and yet being unable to successfully chance upon a measure of cure, someone in such a situation must, I believe, be terribly caught in a quandary over being so utterly powerless in the very first place.

Perhaps, the biggest and most commendably courageous step forward, apart from of course, being the person that you were during those telling times, was your remarkable ability in speaking to the world what it was to be who you were, the family included.

Surely, today, all of you are much stronger with the realization that there have been many lessons learnt with the passage of time and I take this opportunity to greatly appreciate the person you are for the unimaginable commitment and courage that you have so characteristically displayed, without a moment of doubt, specifically at a time when all of that would have been so easily impossible!

I'm touched, beyond words and cannot possibly describe how it feels!

Very sincerely,

V. Rakesh

Footnotes: 

Beautiful Boy is about a very moving account of a boy and his addiction to Methamphetamine, narrated in first person by his father.