Inside was a small leather notebook, and on the first page, in his careful hand, a title. For Mom, one memory for every year you have had me.
I turned the pages, and there they were, twenty-two of them, one for every year of his life, each a memory he was afraid I might one day forget.
He had written down everything, the time I stayed up all night sewing his costume, the way I always cut the crusts off, the summer we drove to the ocean with no money and had the best week of our lives, twenty-two memories in all, and at the end he wrote that he was giving them back to me so that if he ever could not be there, I would never run out of him.
So I would never run out of him. My planner, my boy who thought ahead about everything, had thought ahead about this too. With a week left, he was making sure his mother would always have something of him to hold.
That is why I sat down on the edge of the couch and could not lift my eyes. He had spent his last quiet hours writing me a well that would never run dry.
I read one entry every night before bed. Twenty-two of them, and when I reach the end I start again, and it is never the same, because some nights the ocean summer makes me laugh and some nights it breaks me open, but every night my boy is in the room.
His friends from the service found me. They add their own memories now, stories from the years I was not there, and I write those in the back of his notebook so it keeps growing. He gave me a well, and his brothers keep filling it.
People who have not lost a child sometimes think grief is a wall you eventually get over. It is not a wall. It is a room you learn to live in, and you decorate it with the things they left you, and slowly it stops being only a place of pain and becomes a place you can sit with them a while. That is what opening it gave me. Not the end of the grief, but a chair in the room where I could be with my child again.
The house is quieter than it used to be, I will not lie about that. But it is not empty the way I feared it would be. Every keepsake is a conversation, every anniversary a visit, and the love did not stop when the letters did. If anything it grew, because now I carry it for both of us. That is the secret nobody tells you about losing a child. The loving does not end. It only changes hands, and both hands are yours.
I kept that package sealed for almost a year because I thought it was the end of him. It is the opposite. It is twenty-two years of him, and more every week, and I will never, as he promised, run out. Not ever. Thank you, my planner. Thank you, my boy.