I find myself strangely shaken by the absence of our two boys.  It started on the drive to the airport after we dropped Will off at Kenyon in Gambier, Ohio (where?).  It had been bucketing down the whole day before as we unloaded his stuff and settled him into his room.  The rain threw itself against his dorm room windows as I tucked in sheets and folded duvets.  The wind rattled the frames while David, Will and I stared at his roommate (perfectly nice boy) while he hung a massive American flag over his bed.  The sky stayed resolutely heavy and gray all through our jolly dinner on a porch already wet with the day’s weather.

But, as David and I swept down the highway the next day, farmland rolling away on either side, the sun struggled out and glanced off the drops clinging to the last of the corn silk.  We swerved carefully, politely past an Amish buggy clip-clopping along the road and as I turned around to look at the driver under his wide-brimmed hat I was struck by how vast the backseat seemed, how lonely it looked without Will sprawled across it.  For a moment I was bereft and for a second in that moment I felt a flash of the kind of complete emptiness my friend must feel every second of every moment of every day as she mourns the death of her son.  I literally caught my breath, I almost gagged the grief was so intense, so physical.  I thought I might pass out from the pressure on my chest, I might actually be sick from the weight of loss.  I looked at David and told him what I was feeling, for just that second.  And even as I described it to him and he nodded, understanding exactly what I meant, I was ashamed of my grief.  My son was going to college, her son would never see fifteen.  My older son was on the Cape with my daughter, surfing, laughing, visiting with the grandparents.  Her older son was with his uncle, the only relative either of them have left, visiting South Africa, the scene of the terrible accident that took the lives of four people in the time it took me to glance back at the Amish farmer.  Our family was marking milestones of joy on our road.  My friend’s small, resolute family mark each day with relief that they have, somehow, gotten through it.  And they get through it with remarkable grace, clinging to each other, three firm chins up, three sets of eyes turned to the horizon.

And still, I look into Will’s room and swallow, hard.  Today, James drove off to college for his senior year.  He’d spent the morning surfing some pretty damn big waves with his sister while his father and I gave them the thumbs up from the safety of our towels.  Now, I have just finished clearing out the detritus in James’s room and by that I mean about 700 pounds of sand and salt and more hair product than there is at a Miss America pageant.  It still smells like him: citrus and cotton and boy.  Twenty minutes after he left I got a call. “I forgot my pillows,” James said, the sound of wind rushing through his little jalopy loud and evidence that he was already driving too fast.  I assured him he could buy pillows in Pennsylvania (Yes, another hotbed of Amish non-hijinks).  “Slow down,” I told him.  “Are you on hands-free?” I shouted.  Oh, it is all so fragile, it really is.

I spoke with my friend this morning.  She spent a week with us on the Cape, she usually spends two but this year the timing was bad.  She needed to be home, in London, on the anniversary of the accident.  She feels safer there, even though it is clear that she will never feel truly safe again.  She’d had a bad week.  It was clear from her voice that she was barely keeping her head above water.  Her tears were, almost literally, drowning her, her grief so overwhelming I pictured her clinging to the wreckage, alone in a vast sea of sadness where wave after wave crashed over, filling her mouth with salty, liquid bereavement.  She told me how tired she was, how tired of being brave and strong, the things for which she has always been–justly–known.  I pictured her as the child she’d lost, cheeks wet with tears, knees scraped and muddy, worn and just DONE with all this grown up work.  And, there was not one thing I could do to make it better, nothing I could say or build or cook or clean or feed her that would fix this.

And yet, I sensed her pull herself together.  I swear I could hear the sound of her resolve re-forming as she drew a shaky breath.  “So, tell me,” she said, her voice still watery but gaining strength, “How did Will take to college?  Tell me everything about it.”  Tell me everything about a life I will never get to live with my son, that’s what she was asking me.  And I did, making her laugh as I described how, for some reason, every picture I took that weekend was of David and Will walking away from me.  She hooted at the American flag and reminded me that we have a Union Jack in the closet that absolutely MUST be sent, post haste, to Kenyon so that Will can assert his inner Englishman.  She sighed as I told her how we’d sneaked Will a beer at the end of the move-in day–at eighteen in England, he’d been drinking responsibly for two years.  We’d all sipped a frosty lager as we showered (not together, each to his/her aggressively countrified room), and then met up for dinner.  And, she’d added her tears to mine when I told her how we’d driven off, Will a steadily diminishing figure in the rear view mirror.

So, yes, I miss my boys.  I miss Will’s humor and James’s earnestness.  I long for the sound of big feet thundering down the steps, of surfboards sliding in and out of the car, sand and wax leaving a crunchy ridge on the back window.  The fridge is much more spacious, as is the the laundry hamper.   But here’s the thing: all of this is as it should be.  Every step taken away from us is right, every forgotten pillow or book, or flip flop can be sent on to them, every phone call will serve to reassure us that all is well.  And all iswell, for us.  For my friend, the joy she cannot tamp down will continue to struggle to the surface, her laughter will bubble up, and her instinct to go forward, to care for the son she still has, will prevail.  And my moment of loss will be just that, a moment, to be replaced by those of pleasure and anxiety and pride as I watch all my children grow up.