This week’s essay is a bit of a departure from the standard Mayfly fare. As we’ve discussed before, sometimes life moves quickly, at other times slowly. This week, it feels as though life accelerated. This week marked the end of an extraordinary life, and in that moment, I wish to pause, reflect, and honor.
God bless the child. That phrase has a history. It belongs to Billie Holiday, who wrote it out of an argument with her mother in 1939, and it has always meant one thing—God bless the child who has no one to lean on but themselves. It has been picked up and reimagined many times over by the great musicians of the twentieth century.
But there is another version of that small prayer, older and quieter, spoken not in defiance but in devotion. It is the one spoken over a child by someone who chose to carry them.
In Jewish homes around the world, every Friday evening before the Sabbath meal, parents place their hands on their children’s heads and speak words they did not write. May God bless you and keep you. May God shine His face upon you and be gracious to you. May God turn His face toward you and grant you peace. The prayer comes from the Book of Numbers, but its practice is older than anyone can date.
A scholar at the Jewish Theological Seminary, who calls his grown children every Friday to recite the blessing by phone, once explained why he uses these ancient words instead of his own. He said that if he used his own words, he would be expressing nothing more than a hope. But by using words larger than himself, he was saying something different: I don’t know what would be best for you. I leave it in the hands of a Power greater than both of us.
In Islam, when a child is born, the first sound it hears is a prayer. The father whispers the adhan—the call to prayer—into the newborn’s right ear. Before the child has opened its eyes to the room, before it knows the face of its mother, it has already been spoken over. The child is considered an amanah—a trust, a sacred deposit—placed by God into human hands that must answer for how they held it.
In Christianity, a godparent stands at the baptismal font and accepts a strange commission. You are not the child’s parent. You did not ask for this weight. But you are handed it anyway—the spiritual responsibility for a life that is not your own. The early church at the time of St. Augustine called the godparent a surety before God, someone who had promised to be “the teacher and guardian of another” and should never allow the one they received to be deserted, so long as that person stood in need of care.
Three traditions. Three different vocabularies. But the architecture is the same. A blessing is not a wish. It is not a coin tossed into a fountain, light and hopeful and immediately forgotten. A blessing is a bestowing—an act of weight. To bless a child is to step forward and carry the shape of their future in your hands before they are strong enough to carry it themselves. It is not sentimental. It is not free. It costs attention, faithfulness, and years.
I know this because a man named Tom carried this weight for me.
Tom was my godfather. He was, in the most literal sense, a wonderful Mad Man—an advertising executive who came of age in the 1960s and built a career in that golden, gin-soaked industry when it was still inventing itself. He lived well. He loved deeply. He married a woman who was beautiful inside and out, and they stayed together for sixty-one years, raising three sons who all followed him into the business. He had a way of seeing the best in every situation, a relentless, almost stubborn optimism that made you feel, in his presence, that the world was fundamentally arcing toward good and that you were lucky to be in it. (The only exception to this philosophy was golf. If Tom found himself twenty over par through twelve holes, the joy evaporated and, well, let's just say the optimism took a brief leave of absence. But it was back by the 19th hole.)
When my parents were young—when they were my age—they moved to Tom’s area and lived in his farmhouse, a guest house on his property. I spent my earliest days there. And when I was born, in 1992, Tom became my godfather. He prayed over my life. Not once, at the font, as a formality. He prayed persistently, over years, pleading for blessings and direction for a child who could not yet dream his own dreams. Many of my readers will not share Tom’s faith, and that is fine. That’s not what this is about. What matters is simpler than theology: Tom cared. He cared in his deep, inner spirit about this child whose life trajectory had been in part bestowed upon him. He carried the weight of my future when I did not know yet what it would be.
Now Tom is dying. He is dying of the conditions that come with age, quietly, surrounded by his sons. And I will miss him. I will miss his laughter, his stubborn brightness, the way he refused to let a room stay somber for long. I will miss the image I carry of him at my engagement party—the moment he stood up, walked to the piano, and sang “Try a Little Tenderness” to his wife of more than fifty years. There was not a dry eye in the place. This was a man who loved without embarrassment, who did not hesitate to shed a tear, who felt and gave with a fullness that most of us are too guarded to risk.
I thought about all of this today, on a walk through the woods with my son.
The wind was sharp. Drew was in my arms—small, warm, impossibly light. He is at the age where everything is still wonder, where the world has not yet taught him to be anything other than happy. I held him against the cold and looked at his face, and something rose in me that I did not plan or summon. It arrived the way a reflex arrives—involuntary, immediate, as natural as a heartbeat.
God bless this child.
I did not decide to think it. It was just there, fully formed, as if it had been waiting. And in the seconds that followed, standing in the wind with Drew’s weight against my chest, I understood something I had not understood before. That impulse—that involuntary, wonderful ache to dream forward on behalf of someone who cannot yet dream for themselves—did not come from nowhere. It had a history. It had been planted in me by a man who did the same thing, decades ago, in a farmhouse, over a child who could not yet remember it.
Tom’s long obedience succeeded. Not because it produced a specific outcome—not because my life followed any particular path he might have imagined. It worked because it reproduced itself. The capacity to feel what I felt on that walk, the willingness to hold a child and plead silently for a future I will not control—that is Tom’s handiwork. He did not teach me this. He gave me this, the way the Friday blessing is given, with hands on a head and words larger than the one who speaks them.
When you feel that impulse—when you look at a child and feel the gravity of their innocence pull something out of you that you didn’t know was there—it is worth asking who first carried yours. Who stood over your life before you had a life to stand over? Who bore the weight of your unlived future when no one asked them to? If you can name that person, you have been blessed. And if you have ever felt the impulse to do the same for someone else, then their work is alive in you, whether they know it or not.
As I began writing this, Tom was dying, and he has now passed on. But I believe he is entering into a great joy—the kind he spent his whole life practicing for, the kind he could never quite keep to himself. He will be met by the same warmth he gave so freely, the same tenderness he once sang to his wife from a piano bench while a room full of people teared up in awe.
But this much is certain: Tom lives on. He lives on through his sons, who stayed close and built their lives near his. He lives on through his influence, his stubborn brightness, his refusal to let a room stay dark. And he lives on in a pair of arms carrying a child through the woods on a cold afternoon, feeling an impulse that did not come from nowhere.
It is an indomitable spirit.
I will miss you greatly, Tom. Thank you. Till we meet again.
John
