3

So David thought as his daughter squeezed his listless hand, and his numbed body sank deeper toward oblivion.

“I love you,” Sarie whispered. The remaining pride of his life, she’d had an existence to be envied, devoted husband, fulfilling career, no anguish, no serious illness in her or her husband or her children. The way it should have been for me, David thought. For my wife. For my son.

There once had been a year, the last before his son had died, when everything, every element of every day, had been perfectly aligned and rewarding. In every sense. Creatively. Spiritually. Physically. Emotionally. Monetarily.

Perfection. And then an accident of the universe had struck, a cell gone berserk in the right sixth rib of Matthew’s chest, and time had been measured accordingly-before Matthew’s death and, God have mercy, after Matthew’s death. Sarie, blessed daughter, had managed to adjust and mend. But not David and Donna. Effort had become the norm, pointlessness the rule.

Even now, after so many years, David vividly remembered, as if he were reading it this very minute as he was dying, the eulogy he’d written for the son he missed so fiercely, the son whose life had ceased with cruelty at fifteen and who’d left a vacuum never to be replenished. David had written the eulogy the day after Matthew’s death. The priest hadn’t known Matt and confessed he didn’t feel qualified to make a consoling statement at the funeral.

So David, whose occupation was words, telling stories, had mustered the strength to decide that if words were the means with which he identified his place in the world, the least he could do would be to use what he did, to perform what he was, and try to make sense out of nature’s lack of reason, to let outsiders understand Matthew’s ordeal, and to strain for a moral lesson.

Alluding to a famous character he’d created (without ever mentioning the name of the character), he’d struggled to neither waver nor faint at the funeral, while he glanced dizzily toward the urn containing the ashes of his son-and the picture of his robust son in his prime.