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By Root 934 0

wood room away from the heat and the talk of family in South Carolina. Wade had come, too, and rested with us a bit. He was the oldest young boy, and as we sat and talked about how sweetly he had cared for the other children, how tirelessly and patiently he had played with the youngest of them, he let that smile in the picture come over him: happy to have been the one whose company was cherished, and proud that we thought his gifts to his distant cousins so thoughtful. And we told him, as we often did, how sweet he was, how much we loved him, and how proud we were. The camera captured the cherished boy smiling tenderly back at us. A moment it was, before someone came in and offered iced tea, and in that moment a perfect portrait that slid away, a captured moment that was Wade.

Sometimes the exchanges seemed odd when viewed from any distance, but we were all right there, naked and needing each other’s warmth. I remember a teacher of mine in graduate school. Dr. Eliasson taught Old English. (Didn’t know I knew Old English? Well, I don’t anymore.) One day he talked about the varieties of the English language and about the language of intimacy—the pet names, the peculiar phrasing, the shorthand we use with our families. That’s how I think of these exchanges, as the kind of family talk for which we give ourselves additional latitude, as when I wrote to Steve, who was so disconsolate over the death of his mother that he could not even summon anticipation for the upcoming birth of his first child. Thank you for talking of your mother. My son died in April. I ask God daily to take me instead of taking my boy. I often think of what he would feel if God granted my wish and Wade lived and I died. He would, I think, be much like you, disoriented and lonely. I speak to you now as I would speak to Wade if he stood in your place.

You are my precious son. In the months I had you inside me and the years I had you beside me, I imagined for you every happiness. As you were my firstborn child, I had to learn to be a mother. I learned the names of trees so I could teach them to you. I would finish the books I read to you even after you fell asleep, with the same cadence and inflection, listening in the pauses to your deep breath. I would hunt for old lullabies to sing to you, picking out the tune on the piano until I had made the song my own, your own. And later I stayed up all night typing your papers as you dictated. I searched the stores for a special box for your first corsage. And I bored you with parables so that you would know instinctively the way to be a good man. You never failed me.

There was never a point in my parenting you when I would have chosen to hurt you the way you hurt now. And I grieve to think that in death I have caused you this pain, that I have made you feel even that the birth of your child will be insufficient joy. I meant to give you life, to give you joy for life. And when I died, knowing I had done all I knew to do to give you that joy, I died satisfied. My most important work was done. And now my death undoes that, unwraps my work, and leaves you without the tethers to character and strength and compassion that I worked so hard, so lovingly, to tie.

But, son, the best of me did not die. I gave the best of me to you. All I valued and all I cherished, all I knew and all I dreamed, I gave to you. It can die, of course, if you let it. Or it can live the full and magnificent life I hoped for you. And you can teach that baby all I taught you about living well, and I will live on again. My legacy—my life’s work—is in your hands. Take hold of life, son. It is all I really hoped for in life or in death. Almost nothing else I wrote was as therapeutic for me, because I know Wade would, if he could, admonish me as I had admonished Steve.

My turn then for the doldrums. Another day without Wade. That’s how I started a post three weeks after his seventeenth birthday. It wasn’t getting any better. Today two letters drifted in, two late voices wishing us comfort. A few days over four months since I heard my son’s own voice.