“You have to make healing yourself a project,” Jep had told Stefan. “You have to let yourself feel the healing.” His father’s words didn’t have the intended effect, Stefan later told us. Instead, the sound of the words rolled over and over in his mind, healing, feeling, healing, feeling, urging him to do something, to offer something, to realize something that would really matter to someone else, but would excite and delight him at the same time.

He thought about what he still felt...grief, shame, frustration, remorse. He thought of what he wanted to feel, especially since his eye had healed so well...a second chance, a new life, a different outcome, a positive point of view. It was a project.

The Healing Project. Those three words.

“Look, Stefan,” I told him. “That day we went to the cemetery, I wasn’t trying to use your obsession with Belinda to guilt trip you. I was just reminding you how she always would say to you, don’t waste your life, and how, as awful as it is, you now have this second chance to make something meaningful of your life.”

“Which your landscaping company is doing,” Jep said. “You’re making a lot of people happy, some who you’ll never even meet. You’re giving people beauty to appreciate. And you’re healing. You’re healing from your injury and from prison.”

Neither of us knew how to say to our son, you don’t have to be president of the United States. You don’t have to be president of a bank... But what if he did want to be a bank president, or a computer designer or an architect? Were we suggesting somehow that his sights should be limited? That he somehow wasn’t smart enough?

“It’s just that what I do doesn’t really matter,” Stefan said. “Oh sure, I could just go on making people happy with all the pretty flowers and arrangements. Making myself feel temporarily happy.”

I put in, “Honey, no one’s ever happy every minute, and there’s never anything wrong with happy.”

“Except I feel I’m like one of those guys, those athletes of Dad’s. I’ve had it all handed to me. And I didn’t live up to it.”

“Honey, you’ve worked as much as most people for what you got. And you paid for what you did wrong.”

“Well, I suffered. I suffered a little. I should have suffered a lot more. Because what I did was horrendous. I know I owe more. I want to use what I went through for something positive, not just have it be the dark place I go to in my mind.”