▸ Column · A walled settlement at the end of the world; a returned fighter who spent years outside the walls trying to be a father again inside them.
RICK GRIMES replies.
Replied to by Rick Grimes, with a rebuttal from Negan.
The letter
I spent three years outside the walls — clearing the dead, holding the line on runs, doing the things that keep a place like ours standing. Eighteen months ago I came back inside for good, and the man who walked through that gate isn't the father my kids remember. My girl Naomi was six when I left and she's nine now; she flinches when I so much as raise my voice, and I overheard her ask her mother, low, "when's Dad gonna be nice again." My boy Idris is eleven and he's quit talking to me altogether — one word at supper, then he's gone. I don't blame him. A pot dropped in the kitchen and I had my hand on a knife before I knew it. I left his birthday early because a generator sputtered wrong and my whole body went somewhere else. I'm sitting with our doctor, working on it, trying. But every time I reach for them it's like reaching across a canyon, and the waiting just makes it wider. How do I get to be a man my own children want near them, when I can't even recognize the one in the mirror?
Rick Grimes replies
I'm not gonna advise you from a clean place, because I don't have one. My boy Carl watched me become a man he should've been scared of — watched me do things outside the walls and inside them that I'll carry to my grave. I've reached across that same canyon with my own son's name in my mouth. So hear me as a man who knows the distance you're describing, not a man who skipped it.
Here's what I learned over a whole lot of graves: you don't cross it in one grand reach. You can't. The flinch isn't a wall you talk down — it's a thing that learns slow, in small steady proof. You don't wait to recognize yourself first. You won't, not yet. That comes after.
That startle, the hand going for the knife — feel the cost of it. Good. The day it stops costing you is the day to be scared. Idris isn't punishing you. He's a boy deciding whether the man who left is gonna stay this time. Show up small and every single day — not the dad he remembers, the one who's actually here. That's the only road across, and you walk it slow.
— Rick Grimes
Negan weighs in
Rick. Buddy. "Claw your way back, walk it slow." Beautiful. Here's the part you skipped, soldier — your kid's not waiting for nice. Nice left with the old you and he knows it. He's waiting to find out if you'll quit on him again. So quit apologizing for the man who came home and just BE him, consistent, every day, same fella at supper whether he answers or not. The flinch heals on the calendar, not on a speech. And the day you got "soft" wasn't the day you got better — trust a man who lost the person who kept him decent. You don't get her back. You build the next thing anyway. Show up. Done.
— Negan
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