Not because he knew exactly what would happen.
Not because he had stopped believing he might survive.
But because he loved us enough to imagine the possibility of a future in which he wouldn’t be there.
I had wanted to protect my son from the thought of death.
He had been trying to protect us from being left behind.
It took me a long time to understand that both of us had been afraid, and both of us had been trying to love each other through it.
Years passed.
Grief changed, though it never disappeared.
Some mornings, I could think about Jack without crying. Other days, I would hear a teenager make one of his jokes or see a boy riding a bicycle with his shoelaces untied, and the loss would return so suddenly that I would have to stop what I was doing.
Daniel and I learned to talk about our son without treating every memory as something fragile.
