I was sitting on my late son’s bed, holding one of his shirts, when his teacher called to say she had left me something at school.
My son had been gone for weeks. I hadn’t heard his voice or seen his face for the last time, and suddenly someone told me he still had something to say to me.
I pressed Owen’s blue camp shirt to my face when the phone rang.
She still retained a faint trace of his scent. Now she spent every day in her room, surrounded by schoolbooks, sneakers, baseball cards, and a silence that didn’t seem empty, but unbearably cruel.
Some mornings, I could still see him in the kitchen, tossing a pancake too high and laughing when half of it fell onto the stove. That was the last morning I saw him alive.
He looked tired, although he smiled and told me not to worry when I asked if he was getting enough sleep.
Owen had been battling cancer for two years. Charlie and I had placed all our hopes in the belief that he would survive. That’s why the lake took not only our son, but also the future we had already begun to imagine.
That morning, Owen went out with Charlie and some friends to the lake house. In the afternoon, my husband called me in a voice I barely recognized. A storm had struck too quickly. Owen had fallen into the water. The current swept him away.
Search teams searched for days, but found nothing. Finally, they uttered the words families are forced to accept when there’s no comfort.
Owen was pronounced dead.
No body. No goodbye.
I completely collapsed. I was admitted for observation, and Charlie took care of the funeral because I couldn’t stand it. When there’s no real goodbye, the pain seems never-ending; it just keeps going around.
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