Dearest Young Jimmy,
I hope that this letter finds you in good health and spirits. I want to write and let you know that you come from good parents, Aihoto, Peter, Keski Miki, Junior, and Akiko — all of them are our family, even if we experienced our parents differently.
It was my hope that you would follow through on your boyhood goals of being a marine biologist and fulfilling the “American Dream” by the age of thirty.
I am sorry to say the choices I made at the age of twelve set me on a crash course to a life of drug addiction until I decided to get sober in prison at forty-three. The choices I made had many unintended consequences and hurt too many people. The worst consequences of my poor choices: I took someone’s life.
I live with the fact that I created difficult relationships with the people that I love most in the world. My mother struggles with the fact that I’m doing forty-one years in prison. My daughter, who was twenty-two months old when I came to prison needed to be adopted. Now, my family relationships are monitored by the Department of Corrections.
After fifteen years into my forty-one sentence, I realized that I could have helped us reached all our goals if I never made the poor choice to drink, do drugs, and make poor decisions. I regret many of the choice that I’ve made as a young person, but I know that I can make better decisions moving forward.
We have natural leadership abilities; we can command a room and hold attention. We are fair. Most of the people we’ll encounter will respect us, just as we respect them.
You will experience some difficult things in life. My advice is to vocalize how you feel and people will understand and respect you for it. Your passion for cooking will be the way you share love in the world. Our new goal is to become a small business owner of a food truck when we get out of prison.
We have worked to regain the relationship with our daughter Charlotte who loves us but can’t find the words or the way to have a conversation about what it is like to have father who committed a murder and left her to figure out life on her own. We continue to do what we can from prison and accept the relationship that we have.
I want you to know that everything that you are going to experience in life will make you who you are. Life is not going to be easy but it is filled with hope and wonder. You just have to make it through the difficult stuff to get to the positive parts of our life. In the end, we’ll be able to say that we made it the best that we could.
With all love and respect,
Jimmy K.