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By Root 913 0

had grown up were placed—children with whom he had gone to child care, classmates, teammates, and friends. Each child went to Thomas’s studio and placed their right hand slowly, evenly into a wooden box of warm wax. Thomas poured cool water over their hand, and they could feel the wax harden. From those molds came the seventy handprints that formed the face of the wall, seventy hands coming forward, pressing themselves against the plaza’s space. Thomas described the hands by saying, “The head of a comet is made up of a lot of parts. And one of the continuities of life is that there is community that lives on, that gets replenished.” The bright light that was Wade was passed on. The bench is public art, and so now and again someone will skateboard across it, leaving black scars on the edges of the benches. I fought it at first. And then I cleaned it. And Thomas cleaned it. But now I don’t really mind. It means that it is a living piece, with young people, not so unlike Wade, enjoying it.

Cate had started high school in the school Wade attended, in math classes with his classmates, since she had gotten ahead of her own classmates in that subject, passing his friends in the hallways, and I grieved for her. At her first open house, John and I walked through her schedule, just as we had done for Wade three years before. How many laughing faces of parents turned to see ours and a look of great sadness swept over them? We couldn’t say, Don’t be sad for us. They wouldn’t listen even if we could say it. I honestly didn’t know what to do. In being a mother, I relied on instinct and intellect. In parenting a child who has died, I had no resources. And despite our wide circle of support, sometimes I needed even more. I signed up to substitute-teach.

My first substitute teaching assignment at Broughton was hard. It was supposed to be honors chemistry, but there was a mix-up, and it was AP physics. Wade had signed up to take this course, and the class was filled with his friends. As the children worked in groups on worksheets that the teacher had left, I could not help myself—where would he be in these exchanges? I finally asked Maggie Whit-meyer, one of his friends. Right here beside me, she answered sweetly. While the children worked, I tried to push out the images, tried to read a book of essays I had brought with me, The Devil Problem by David Remnick. But the title essay was about Elaine Pagels, the religion professor at Princeton who lost her husband and five-and-a-half-year-old son within fifteen months. Quite a remarkable and thoughtful woman, but I needed to close the book on her. So I picked up the papers from the classroom floor and watched the children eating lunch outside. One of the papers was the ballot for Homecoming Court, much different from my high school days—all seniors still, but boys and girls. Of the twenty-five young people who served as pallbearers and honorary pallbearers at Wade’s funeral, three of them went to boarding schools away from Raleigh, while the other twenty-two went to Broughton—and all twenty-two were nominated for the court. Wade’s life passing on without him, Wade’s class talking and exploring and learning without him, Maggie with an empty desk beside her. I let my mind wander.

The fall was very hard, on me, on all of us, as Broughton High School was in perpetual mourning. A drunk driver severely injured a student getting out of a car at 7:30 in the morning. Another boy was in a coma after a car accident. The assistant minister at the Presbyterian church—a favorite of many of the children and the father of one—succumbed to a cancer that had been attacking him for years. Jackson Griffith, from Wade’s class, the captain of the wrestling team, was playing in the swollen creek across the street from our house after Hurricane Fran came crashing through, and he was grabbed by a whirlpool near an old dam and—though he was strong—held under the muddy water for days. Endless painful days. He had been studying Japanese, and his classmates marked his death with the Obon ceremony I had loved as a child