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By Root 941 0

school class. It wasn’t just me, of course; bereaved mothers across the country were facing spring concerts and banquets and graduations. Graduation was hard. We didn’t want to sit too close—there were so many families who had living children graduating who should be close, but from where we sat at Wade’s graduation, I could hardly see the candles that were lit for Wade and for Jackson. I felt, as I often had, outside myself: the grieving mother, the solicitous friend, the dutiful parent of my surviving daughter, but all as if I were a puppeteer, stripped of the ability to evoke anything other than rudimentary motion in my puppet body. Real life was something other people had, something I’d once had and could not imagine having again. The people we once were are like characters in stories from a book; we were drawn to them, to their fullness and hope and happy naiveté, and yet we could not get to them. It was nearly impossible to believe that once we were them.

It was more than a year since Wade died, and still it seemed there would be no light. On ASG someone wrote of the perils of holding on to grief as a means of holding on to our dead children. His death knocked me down once, and it knocks me over each day, again and again, and I see no end to that, I responded. I can sit and let the pain grow within me. I can feel the tears wall up against the backs of my eyelids, and my face flush, my cheekbones fill with the pressure of the coming torrent. I can rest my mind on his car, rising up in the air, of his terror, of the weight of that car pressing the life from him. I can feel just the way the air felt on the porch as the patrolmen pulled into our driveway. I rub my skirt between my fingers and beg them to tell me he is alive. I hear my No, a wail that they finally stopped outside me but which has continued inside me every day. And the intensity of that pain is greater than any emotion I ever had. Not love, not fear, not wonder. The greatest of all is pain. And I am inclined, on rainy days, or on days we might have celebrated had he lived, or on days when I cannot account for my unsteadiness, on those days I am inclined to wrap myself in my mourning, a comforter, a hairshirt, my son. There is no question that as I pull it closer about me, I feel his presence run through me. It is pain and memory, and I cannot release its hold on me. And he cannot, I remember, release my hold on him, him as a dead boy, when I do this. For when I do this, the fullness of him is gone; all he is the object of my grief. I deny him when holding on to him in pain. He becomes but a dead boy. Gone is the tender boy, the selfless boy, the tired runner, the easy laughter, all that was important to him, all that he loved, it is withered and replaced by that mesmerizing pain. I know I must let the dead boy go.

I could, sometimes, and John and Cate helped. Life was Cate’s softball and Cate and John’s soccer—he was still coaching—and the WELL. I might have had to make some Latin flashcards, but Wade had saved his in a labeled folder—so typical—and Cate didn’t need many new ones. And we turned our faces northward, to Washington. It was politics now. In our kitchen or in John’s office, looking at videotapes of commercials sent by political consultants who wanted John to hire them. Meeting with these strangers who were checking him out like he was a thoroughbred they were thinking of buying. I was sometimes surprised they didn’t open his mouth and check his bite. And I was still trying to get pregnant again. It felt like endless appointments and hundreds of shots. Cycles and failures, but I didn’t have the same anxiety I saw in the doctor’s waiting room and read about online. I had had children; I knew I could handle a pregnancy. I was just old. I say, “just old” like it was nothing, but it wasn’t nothing. It was a real hurdle. But it wasn’t hopeless, either. I knew what hopelessness felt like, and this was not it.

Part of the process of using pharmaceutical help to get pregnant is getting the drugs in you. The clinic nurse handed John an orange and a