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By Root 919 0

doing things, or thought they had, until we reassured them that this was always home to them. At first they were there all the time, not so much for us, I think, as for each other. As time went on, one or two would come by every day or so. They would stay awhile and talk softly to us, as if they were in a library. Honestly, it couldn’t have been much relief to come to that quiet kitchen and talk to those sad parents. John and I knew we had to break this pattern, for them and for ourselves. So we asked the boys and the girls if they would come by every week for dinner. They could come more often—and they did—but every week, every Tuesday, all of them could come at once. (Since I used to feed some of them five nights a week, this was actually less often than before.) And they came. It did me such good to come home to the sound of them. Together, like it had always been. We cooked steaks or spaghetti, or if it had been a tough day we ordered pizza. A dozen children one week. Twenty the next time. They took a picture for the senior yearbook at that basketball court in the back. When Mother’s Day came, the boys brought me a dogwood tree. The girls brought a framed poem surrounded by pictures of Wade. Still it was grades and sports, and politics and teachers. And soon it was colleges. They kept coming, until they graduated from high school the next year. And while they did the house was loud again, filled with stories of Wade and with stories of life that had happened after Wade.

Seeing Wade’s friends happy was the best thing and, honestly, the worst thing for me, but there was never a question about what I wanted. I wanted them to be happy. I want them to have the joys he did not live to have, the success he cannot win, the family he cannot raise. And they are the carriers of his memory. So once a week we would eat and talk, and they would tease one another until it was finally late. Sometimes a child would slip out of the kitchen and go upstairs to sit in Wade’s room. We would find them, with tear-streaked cheeks and red eyes, sitting on the edge of Wade’s bed. Why did this happen, they would wonder, but we had no answers, then or now. We would hug them, and we would leave them, letting them sit as long as they needed. I surely love those children.

I want to make clear that Wade was not perfect. Only the youngest of children who die are perfect. He loved us, knowing our shortcomings—I don’t think I was an easy mother—and we loved him with his shortcomings, though he was really a very easy child. Only once in the last five years that he lived did we quarrel. Of course, I had to tell him to leave his sister alone, and he wouldn’t; or to bring in the soda from the car now, not later, and he would dawdle; or to turn off the television and study, but I would still hear the music to Saved by the Bell coming from the playroom. But these were little things, truly. He found such pleasure in whatever was around him, stumped only by vanity or betrayal. John says something about our younger son, Jack, that was also true of Wade: he says, “I wish I had the same joy about anything in life that he has about everything in life.” The raw material for a fine man was there in Wade. And it gave us pleasure, and now it gave pain. But we were finding our footing. Wade was helping; he wouldn’t be, as we had feared, easily erased.

It was easier, too, because so many had hold of our waists, holding us up as Dick Henderson had held us up that first night when we walked to the morgue. Hayes Permar, a classmate of Wade’s, came by and played a song he had written for Wade, about wishing they had had more time. I want to rock you in the water in the river of my mind. I want to thank you for your laughter; I only wish we had more time. Wade’s English teacher told us a story of how special he was. In her AP English class, they had been studying The Snows of Kilimanjaro the week before Wade died. They discussed it for four days, and Wade participated. But until she read his obituary, she did not know, because he had not mentioned, that he had climbed Kilimanjaro