Just Beyond the River Bend | Searching for Faerie, Finding Me

Today's amazing sunrise celebrated my father’s upcoming 90th birthday. My father Alan, was born in 1936, and even now, years after his passing, I still find myself tearing up whenever I think about him. Almost every sunrise from my balcony carries a quiet ache within it. The skies over Las Vegas shift through soft gold, lavender, pink, and blue, and my first instinct is often the same whispered thought: “I wish you could see this.” Sometimes the tears come unexpectedly. The quiet tears that arrive from missing someone who once anchored part of your world simply by existing within it.

Grief is a strange thing. Time moves forward, life becomes fuller and more comfortable, and yet certain absences never truly leave us. In many ways, I think I miss him even more now because I can finally see all the quiet moments we never had the chance to share. He never even thought I would ever dream up a children's book - Searching for Faerie, Finding Me. But before he left for the US in 1988, I remember that he had wanted to go into publishing. I remember him working on sheafs of papers and his typewriter. While he never said it out loud, I knew he dreamed to write and write he did, in letters to brindge the distance. I have collected his letters and will soon have it up on a his very own section in this website (https://www.rosamondsalazar.com/the-story-of-alan-v-salazar) During the last years we spent together in Davao, life was moving quickly around us. My father was dealing with the steady progression of age and illness while I was occupied with nursing school, raising my children, and running a business. Life pulled our attention toward responsibilities and survival. There were no long afternoons quietly sitting together watching sunsets, no peaceful mornings sharing coffee while waiting for the sunrise. At the time, it felt as though there would always be more opportunities later. It is only afterward that we realize how quickly “later” disappears.

I think much of the emotional atmosphere within Searching for Faerie, Finding Me unknowingly grew from that feeling of yearning. I knew of his yearning to write and it makes me sad to know I will never read a new story from him. And maybe that yearning I saw in him is now the yearning that I want to express. Beneath the children's book wonder and imagination lies longing, reflection, and the search for peace after loss. My father was a quiet man, but perhaps quiet people leave behind deeper echoes than they realize. Their influence settles gently into the way we see beauty, carry grief, and search for meaning.

What comforts me most is remembering something he once expressed to me. He said that when he was no longer within my sight, it did not mean he had truly left. He had only gone ahead, beyond where the river bends, momentarily out of view — and someday we would see each other again. Whenever the sunrise breaks across the sky now, I hold onto that thought with all my heart - his promise of being just beyond the bend. That is why this is probably my most favorite page in the Second Edition of Searching for Faerie, Finding Me - where I can imagine him just beyond the river bend.