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By Root 1035 0

” What is the word for the battle-weary, who at some place deep within him continues to rail but whose voice is now quiet, beaten finally into silent submission by reality? The levels of our being are like stories upon stories of a building through which a fire has run, weakening everything, making life on any of these other levels precarious, causing us not to walk to the edges but stay in the middle of the rooms with the false sense that we are there protected. (At least, we imagine, we might see another fire coming at us and might not be caught so unaware.) But on the floors that remain, we carry on with a life that seems, in its sad serenity, both to acknowledge the wreckage below us and to embrace the life about us. Maybe Yeats described it best, and certainly most simply: “I am accustomed to their lack of breath.” Not resigned, or accepting, just accustomed. I know I have a relationship with my son, a relationship that had been fuller and changing and promising when he lived, but now it is different, flatter, without promise, not so unlike the relationship you might have with a family member who has moved far away, about whose new surroundings you know nothing. So when you speak, it is easier to talk about what you do share, although it means your relationship is time-stamped on the last day you lived together. That’s what I have, and that’s what I make the most of.

The Learning Lab was getting built, so there were building plans to approve, wall colors to choose, study tables to buy and…the list kept us busy, doing in our lives what he might have done in his. I read a wonderful book, After the Death of a Child by Ann Finkbeiner, whose son TC died in a railroad accident. It discussed parents who had lost their children five, ten, twenty years before. My favorite parent was Lyght—not just for his name but for his gentle spirit. He worked for Hospice, in an unspoken way for his son. When Ann posted on ASG once, I wrote her, telling her how much her book had helped me, how I had followed her advice to let friends know that I would still hurt in the next decade and the next, and if they wanted to really help, they could remember Wade then. I told her how much I admired Lyght. And then I got an e-mail from Lyght. She had told him, and he had reached out. You see, we really are a big—much too big—family.

When we had asked his friends what they wanted us to do to remember Wade, I have to admit that they didn’t say a computer lab. They wanted a bench in the outdoor lunch area at Broughton High School. We went to Shaw University one day and I saw a lovely stone bench with a plaque on the back that said “In Memory of Anne Hollins.” That’s what I first had in mind when we went to Thomas Sayre, a sculptor and artist in Raleigh. Thomas was our age and a close friend of friends of ours, but we hadn’t known him. His vision for the bench exceeded our pedestrian expectations. He started with an idea of a series of poles in a spiral shape throughout the picnic area. Poor Thomas, the idea made me cry. Wade was already too scattered, I said, his image like the rings of a skimmed stone spreading outward but fading. I needed as much of him as possible gathered together. And Thomas, sweet Thomas, needed to find another idea, one that didn’t make me cry. And he did.

A Place in Time is one hundred feet long, most of it a long weaving tiered bench that forms the tail of a comet shape. The head of the comet is a small courtyard, with an inscription, written by Wade at the end of his sophomore year in an essay in Latin class. “The modern hero is a person who does something everyone thinks they could do if they were a little stronger, a little faster, a little smarter, or a little more generous. Heroes in ancient times were the link between man and perfect beings, gods. Heroes in modern times are the link between man as he is and man as he could be.” He was fourteen when he wrote it. At the front edge of the little plaza is an irregular wall made up of eighty blocks, large pillows of concrete on which the handprints of the people with whom Wade