Dedicated to Alexander Mikhailov (1952-1985)...I am writing a letter from places from which they do not return. I died at 32, hanged myself. 29 years have passed since then. My son has grown up... Now he is older than me, he is 37. For a long time, my relatives and friends could not believe what had happened. They wondered: “What prompted you?”, they regretted: “So young,” they scolded: “I didn’t even spare my son!”, they were surprised: “I wasn’t afraid of the Lord’s judgment!”, because suicides are not honored in the afterlife. I myself didn’t understand for a long time my feelings, I knew I was just doing this for my mother and I no longer had the resources to live, so even hellfire didn’t scare me. I had enough time to figure everything out, including my feelings. On the day of suicide, and throughout my entire previous life, I experienced a tangle of feelings for my mother, the simultaneous existence of which on earth seems impossible. This is a feeling of crazy love along with crazy hatred and the associated guilt, because you can’t hate your mother... That’s what my mother once said or made me understand, and I always tried to be an obedient boy... And I also feel crazy loneliness and endless pain resentment for the unfair punishments and insults that my mother inflicted on me. Not really realizing this carousel of feelings, I tried to hide them from those around me and from myself. This required the strain of all my mental powers and depressed my mood. I distracted myself as best I could with various intellectual pursuits: I studied with interest the magazines “Science and Life” and “Technology for Youth”, independently invented various electrical devices, and designed radios. I could teach my son everything...Why did I do this? I did it out of love for you, dear mother! You hated me so often that I gradually came to the conclusion that I could only please you by disappearing from this world. On the other hand, I did this out of hatred for you. I understood that somewhere deep down in your soul you still love me and some part of you would be upset if I was gone. I wanted to hurt you, to take revenge for the pain that you caused me over the years. There is another reason. You convinced me so much that I was worthless and I myself believed that such a nonentity like me had nothing to do on earth. Then I could not deal with my feelings as I can do now. Only now I understand that this was a childish attempt to reach your heart, to hold you accountable for what you did to my soul, to find a response and understanding. Understanding that I am also a person with my own perception of the world, interests, fragility... Your crazy scandals out of the blue, your inadequate reactions that did not correspond to my misdeeds, deeply wounded my childish soul with their injustice. After them, I constantly felt empty and destroyed and it took me a long time to get back to life again. And your impulsive outbursts of aggression towards your children were repeated again and again. You took out your rage on me for the fact that your husband is a scoundrel, for your bad mood and just like that. And now the worst thing for me is to realize, 29 years later, that my sacrifice was in vain. You left this life on time without rethinking anything or repenting. Thank you for regularly going to the grave, planting flowers and shedding tears. These false, showy tears, a deception for the neighbors and for myself. If my soul could cry, it would spill onto the ground with days of rain that would flood everything around - there is so much unexpressed childhood pain in it! You didn’t allow me to cry either, saying that men don’t cry. I don’t know if men cry, but I know that they are capable of feeling very strongly. I thought that I would never figure out my relationship with you. I figured it out... through my niece and goddaughter, who remained there on Earth and became a psychotherapist. Now I understand that those conflicting feelings that I had for you took away all my strength for life and nothing could stop me then. Your daughter, my sister became absolute