I was sitting on my late son’s bed holding one of his T-shirts when his teacher called and said he had left something for me at school. My boy had been gone for weeks. I had not heard his voice or seen his face one last time, and suddenly someone was telling me he still had something to say.
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I had Owen’s blue camp shirt pressed to my face when the phone rang.
It still smelled faintly of him. I sat in his room every day now, surrounded by schoolbooks, sneakers, and baseball cards, and the kind of silence that did not feel empty so much as cruel.
I sat in his room every day now.
Some mornings I could still see my son in the kitchen flipping a pancake too high and laughing when it landed half on the stove. That was the last morning I saw him alive.
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He looked tired, though he still smiled through it and told me not to baby him when I asked if he was sleeping enough.
Owen had been fighting cancer for two years by then. Charlie and I had built our whole hope around the belief that he was going to come through it. That is why the lake took more than our son that day. It took the future we had already started promising ourselves.
Owen left that morning with Charlie and some friends for the lake house. By afternoon, my husband was calling me in a voice I did not recognize. He told me Owen had gone into the water. A storm had rolled in too fast. And the current had carried our son away.
That was the last morning I saw him alive.
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