I am writing to you, Maurice, to tell you that I am embarking on the search for this peace, and to beg your forgiveness for so many things. Forgive me for not having known how to protect you from death. Forgive me for not having been able to find the words at that terrible moment when you slid through my fingers, to express what I felt, and above all for not having held you so tightly that God would not have been able to take you away.

There is no moment in my life, my son, where you are not present. How many paths travelled before I was able to listen and hear the sound of my pain, of our pain.

Your thirteen years of life brought me infinite happiness.

Today, I know that you were just passing through to show me the way, to reveal how I could lead my life, and by leaving me you invited me to dare to change something that I could not envisage until then. You had the power to say, through your presence, however fleeting, and your brutal disappearance, ‘Mum, dare [to live] your life, only you will live it.’ Today I am listening and I hear the message that my son has sent me, my son whose ephemeral life has wounded me for ever because I was deaf to his message for so long.

Today the journey is ending, my son has reached harbour again, on a faraway shore, close to the rising sun. He has once more found the light vessel of his childhood that will lead him gently towards the peace he has attained.

So my dear, my love, I let the balloon rise to the skies, serenely, with all the tenderness of a mother.

May this bottle thrown far from the shore stay forever rocked by the ocean, in the ebb and flow of the rolling waves.

While God gives me life, I promise you to live it to the full, to savour each instant in richness and in serenity.

I know that we will find one another again, when the time comes. God owes it to us.

Farewell my son, farewell my love.

I love you with all my heart, with all my soul, and I am proud to have been your mother. Fly away in peace.

Go, my love, go towards the light, my gentle seagull. May the source of your soul surge and run murmuring towards the sea, and unfold like the innumerable petals of a lotus flower.

It may be that most of us write our own life story, making it up as we go through life, but there are those whose lives seem written in advance, inescapable, and which form a perfect circle. There are others whose course is unforeseeable, sometimes incomprehensible. What I have had the sorrow of losing in my life has taught me what is most precious, just as it has taught me about this love for which I can only be grateful.