By The Time You Read This … – Robert G. Wertzler

What to write only to be read after you are dead?
Not just something for suicide notes
Not only for wills and final testaments
A bit of song applies:
“Who is it whom I address,
Who takes down what I confess?” *
There the question, to whom?
What confessions, what secrets
What outrageous opinions
What advice sent into future
What story like Twain’s “The War Prayer”
His will that it not be published
Until fifty years after he died
What to say for when no
Reply can be heard?
What would I set down
With that posthumous condition?
What would you?

* “Teachers”, Leonard Cohen

Bob Wertzler is retired from almost twenty years in the mental health field in California and Arizona. There are times the title, “Recovering Therapist”, seems to fit. In 2006 he retired to move to Western North Carolina to help and become primary care giver for his father who had developed Dementia. Before all that, there was work at various times as a soldier (US Army 1967-70), community organizer, cab driver, welfare case worker, wooden toy maker, carpenter, warehouse worker, and other things. He relates to a line in a Grateful Dead song, “What a long, strange trip its been.”