PART 3
Then, back to me:
“We’ll send something to the funeral home.”
I closed my eyes.
“Something?”
“A flower arrangement, Allison.”
I almost laughed.
Not because anything was funny.
Because sometimes grief becomes so enormous that your mind reaches for the only response it can find.
A flower arrangement.
My twelve-year-old son was dead, and my mother was discussing flowers as if she were ordering decorations for a birthday party.
“I don’t need flowers,” I said.
“Well, what do you want us to do?”
I opened my mouth.
I wanted to say, Come.
Just come.
Sit beside me.
Hold my hand.
Cry with me.
Say his name.
Tell me you loved him.
Tell me he mattered.
Instead, I whispered:
“I wanted my family.”
There was silence.
Then my mother said something I’ll never forget.
“You have to stop expecting everyone to drop their lives whenever something happens to you.”
Something happens to me.
That was how she described Tyler dying.
Something happening to me.
Not losing her grandson.
Not losing my child.
Something happening to me.
I hung up.
I didn’t call them again.
That night, I sat beside Tyler’s hospital bed long after the nurses had covered him.
His hair was still damp from when they’d cleaned him.
I touched his forehead.
It was cold.
“I’m sorry,” I whispered.
The words came out over and over.
“I’m sorry.”
For what?
I didn’t even know.
For not noticing sooner.
For not forcing him to stay home that morning.
For not answering when he had called me from school earlier that week because I was busy working.
For every time I’d said, “Five more minutes, sweetheart.”
For every soccer game I’d missed because my family needed money handled.
For every dinner where I had been staring at my phone because my father had called.
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