The months after the funeral passed slowly.
People stopped calling as often.
The flowers disappeared.
The cards were placed in a drawer.
Life began asking ordinary things of us again.
Daniel returned to work.
I returned to mine.
We went grocery shopping and paid bills and answered questions about how we were doing.
Sometimes we said we were fine.
Sometimes we said we were getting through it.
Neither answer explained much.
I learned that grief could make a familiar place feel unfamiliar.
I could walk into the kitchen and suddenly remember Jack standing beside the counter, insisting that a burned sandwich was still perfectly edible.
I could open the refrigerator and see the ketchup bottle he had used so freely.
I could hear a television in another room and remember how he used to argue with the characters on screen.
The memories were small.
That was why they hurt.
They belonged to a life that had once seemed ordinary.
One evening, Daniel found me looking through photographs.
I had spread them across the dining table.
There were pictures from birthdays, school events, holidays, and afternoons when nothing special had happened.
I had been searching for one of Jack and Theo together.
I found several.
In one, they were standing in the backyard with a broken garden hose between them.
In another, they were sitting on the living room floor, surrounded by board-game pieces.
Then I found the photograph from when they were eight.
The muddy one.
Daniel sat beside me.
"That's a good picture."
I nodded.
"They were so little."
He picked it up and studied it.
"I remember the window incident."
I laughed softly.
"The bird?"
"The strongest bird in the world."
We smiled.
Then Daniel put the photograph down.
"I keep thinking about what Theo said."
I knew what he meant.
Jack had sometimes believed he might die.
I looked at my husband.
"Me too."
Daniel rubbed his face.
"Do you think we made it hard for him to talk about it?"
I wanted to say no.
The answer came to my mind immediately.
We had done everything we could.
We had taken him to appointments, followed medical advice, stayed beside him whenever possible, and tried to give him reasons to keep hoping.
We had loved him.
We had done our best.
But Daniel wasn't asking whether we had loved our son.
He was asking whether our fear had made it difficult for Jack to tell us his own.
I looked down at the photograph.
"I don't know."
It was the most honest answer I had.
Daniel nodded.
"I wish we'd known."
"So do I."
We sat quietly for a while.
I remembered conversations with Jack that I had once considered encouraging.
He would mention something he wanted to do after treatment, and I would immediately begin helping him plan it.
If he talked about college, I asked about applications.
If he talked about traveling, I asked which places he wanted to visit.
If he talked about the future, I followed him there.
I thought I was showing him that I believed in him.
Perhaps I was.
But I wondered whether he had sometimes needed something different.
Perhaps he had wanted to say that he was afraid without hearing us rush to explain why he shouldn't be.
Perhaps he had wanted to talk about the possibility of dying without feeling that he was taking hope away from us.
I would never know.
I couldn't ask him now.
That was one of the hardest things about grief.
It left questions that had no place to go.
A few days later, Theo came over again.
He found me in the kitchen, sorting through some of Jack's papers.
I had begun organizing them, although I hadn't decided what to keep or where anything should go.
Theo stood in the doorway.
"Do you need help?"
I looked at the pile.
"Maybe. I don't know what I'm doing."
He came to the table and sat down.
For a while, we sorted through ordinary school papers.
There were assignments Jack had completed before his illness became too demanding.
There were notes from teachers.
There were pages covered in handwriting that grew harder to read toward the bottom.
Theo looked at one sheet and smiled.
"He hated that class."
I laughed.
"He hated every class that required him to write more than a page."
"That's not true."
I raised an eyebrow.
Theo considered it.
"All right. Most of them."
We laughed.
Then he found a paper with a list of places Jack wanted to visit.
He read it quietly.
I watched his expression change.
"He talked about these places all the time," Theo said.
"I know."
"He really thought we'd go someday."
I sat down beside him.
"Yes."
Theo folded the paper carefully.
"I think he would have liked that."
I looked at him.
"Liked what?"
"Going somewhere new. Seeing something he hadn't seen before."
He glanced down at the list.
"He always wanted to know what things were like outside the life he already knew."
I thought about the way Jack used to ask questions.
He wanted to know how people lived in other countries.
He wanted to understand places he had only seen in books or on television.
He could turn a simple conversation about geography into an argument about why we should all travel more.
I had always thought he would eventually get his chance.
I had imagined him coming home with stories.
I had imagined him calling from somewhere far away.
I had imagined all the ordinary ways a child grows up and becomes someone with a life of his own.
Now those imagined futures remained with me, even though I knew they would never happen.
Theo placed the list on the table.
"I wish he'd had more time."
I looked at him.
"So do I."
Neither of us tried to make the statement easier.
We didn't say that everything happened for a reason.
We didn't say that Jack was in a better place.
We didn't say anything that might have made the loss sound smaller.
We simply sat together.
And for the first time, I understood that being there for someone didn't always mean giving them hope.
Sometimes it meant allowing them to be sad without asking them to stop.
That evening, Theo stayed for dinner.
Daniel cooked, although he burned the toast and blamed the toaster.
Theo laughed.
I laughed, too.
For a moment, the kitchen felt almost familiar.
Then I noticed the empty chair where Jack used to sit.
The laughter faded.
Theo saw me looking.
He didn't say anything.
He simply moved his chair a little closer to the table and continued eating.
That small gesture comforted me.
He wasn't trying to replace Jack.
He wasn't trying to make the house feel as it had before.
He was simply staying.
Just as he had stayed during the difficult months.
Just as he had stayed in the chapel when people whispered.
Just as he had stood before the microphone and told us what Jack had asked of him.
I began to understand that his friendship had not ended with the funeral.
It had changed.
And in a way I hadn't expected, that friendship was helping us learn how to live with the loss.
Source: kaylestore.net
Click here to continue reading: PART 7: The More I Remembered Jack’s Last Months, the More I Understood That Hope Had Never Meant Being Certain
I Thought My Son’s Best Friend Had Crossed a Line Until I Saw What He Was Carrying Into the Chapel
Part 6 of 12
