Note: I recently went to see the Broadway musical version of The Lion King, and was inspired by one of the songs. Hence the title. :)
Disclaimer: Star Wars and Luke Skywalker belong to George. Luke's wife Tamrin, though, is mine. :)
They Live In You
Luke Skywalker is ever aware that the life he lives is not his own.
He has long ago lost track of how many people have given their own lives so that he might live. Perhaps he could count them, if he tried, but he does not wish to reduce them to mere numbers.
Some he remembers clearly, some are only vague shadows of faces, and some do not even have names. He is not sure which is the more tragic, or the more beautiful. (For he is wise enough to see that there is beauty in this giving of life, and not sorrow only.) But sometimes, he wishes he could remember, could know more, could catch even a glimpse of the mysteries that are the ones who died for him.
His mother. Uncle Owen and Aunt Beru. Obi-Wan. Biggs. Dack. So many Rebel pilots whom he never met, whose names he never even knew.
His father.
He had seen death before that moment. Force knew he had seen far too much of it. It was cold, and it was desperate, a lonely agony and a sudden understanding of irrevocable ends. And it had nothing to do with love.
His Jedi masters spoke of peace, of becoming one with the Force. But their words felt empty to him, wrong somehow. The peace they spoke of was just as cold and irrevocable as the death they sought to deny.
He realizes now that he has spent most of his life searching for the meaning of death. Perhaps this is not so surprising in a boy who grew up thinking he was an orphan.
It was his father who taught him that death does, after all, have everything to do with love. It is a gift of self.
Sometimes, when he looks in the mirror, he sees his father's eyes shining out of his mother's face, and he remembers Leia's words—beautiful, kind but sad—and the depth of meaning in his father's eyes as they looked upon one another for the first time. He remembers that he is twice born of love and pain.
He finds joy in that. His Aunt Beru used to say that love by its very nature suffers, and in so doing turns pain into joy.
He knows it is for this reason that his life is not his own. All those who love him, who gave their lives for him, live now in him. And he is never more aware of this fact than in the moments when he holds his infant son.
It is a strange and terrible coincidence (but there are no such things are coincidences, are there?) that none of those who died for him ever had the chance to hold their own children in their arms.
So as he wraps one arm about Tamrin's waist and cradles his son in the other, he is grateful. Little Ben has far more parents than he will ever know.
He lives for all of them.