Ryan had been going to grief counseling alone for almost nine years.
That’s what his wife told me while we sat at my dining room table with cold coffee between us.
I honestly didn’t understand why that was some giant secret.
Then she handed me a notebook.
Every page was about our son.
Not vague journal entries either. Dates. Memories. Conversations Ryan wrote down because he was terrified he’d forget the sound of his voice someday.
One page was just four paragraphs about teaching him to shave before junior prom.
Another was Ryan describing how he still drove past the baseball field every Thursday after work because that’s where our son practiced from age twelve to seventeen.
I kept flipping pages waiting for the horrible part.
Then I found it.
Ryan blamed himself for our son’s death because they fought right before the accident.
Apparently our son wanted to leave a party with friends, and Ryan refused to let him take the truck because he thought somebody there had been drinking. They screamed at each other over the phone. Our son hung up angry and got into the passenger seat of another boy’s car instead.
That was the crash.
Ryan wrote that he replayed the argument every night wondering if our son would still be alive if he’d just driven over there himself instead of trying to “teach responsibility.”
His wife told me Ryan cried constantly after I moved out.
Just never where anybody could see it.
She said he’d sit in the garage holding our son’s old catcher’s mitt against his chest like it physically hurt to put it down.
I started crying before I even realized I was doing it because for ten years I’d convinced myself he didn’t care the way I cared.
The last page in the notebook was written three days before Ryan died.
It said, “If she ever reads this, tell her I loved our boy so much I didn’t survive losing him either.”
Last Sunday I finally opened the storage bin I sealed shut after the funeral.
Ryan’s old wedding ring was still taped inside our son’s senior picture envelope exactly where I left it.