‘A feeling of pronounced euphoria? I think we’re going to make it,’ I say.

She is silent for a moment and then, forgetting herself, lets out a snicker. It is the first time I’ve heard her laugh in months. The sound slips out of her, a living thing fleeing a desolate fate. Her eyes widen and she clasps a hand over her mouth. The crowd turns their attention in her direction; some shake their heads.

I take her hand and lead her out of the restaurant. We venture into the cold together and look back at the congregation through the diner window. They gather round the television as if it is a religious artefact, a barer of elemental truths. They stand with their mouths agape, their hands clasped, and I realise then that we have become separated, somehow, from the world at large. That their concerns are no longer our concerns. Their urgency, the volume of their rising fear, has been quieted in us.

IV

It takes the body months to reconcile what the mind knows as truth.

He is gone, but not entirely.

He is remembered, but not completely.

The body struggles with this. There are brief moments of panic. Waves of nausea when we think that we have forgotten to collect him from school. Moments in busy crowds when we think he has disappeared from our side. Mornings when we open his bedroom door and call out his name. There are baths drawn but never occupied. Plates prepared but left untouched. Car doors opened and closed in a single, mournful gesture.

The mind is solemn. Though it grieves, it knows there is little use.

But the heart, the body, is stubborn. Its muscles reach out, its skin yearns.

And so we busy ourselves with the act of survival. We eat and drink. We shovel snow from the driveway and tend to the house. We return to work so that we may pay our bills. But the purpose is diminished. Who are we working for, if not him?

We cannot be alone together.

We cannot even be alone with ourselves, for he is with us now always. His memory is tethered to ours. His life was our life. His death is our death, for we have been forever changed.

We receive cards and flowers, tokens of commiseration. We see friends and co-workers.

We are sorry for your loss, they say.

We forget, almost, that his name was not ‘your loss’.

Everyone is sorry, yet no one speaks his name.

V

At night our sorrow lies between us, its weight pulling at the bedsheets in much the same way the boy would when seeking safe haven from bad dreams and thunderstorms.

In the dark I am taken back to the days and weeks that followed his death. I remember the stillness and vacuum-like quiet. The collective holding of breath by those who visited to offer their condolences. Even the house was changed by his passing.

You could hear small creaks and groans as its foundations shifted and settled in the night. If you strained your ears the sound of laughter radiated from behind closed doors. From a certain spot in the living room, when you sat still enough, you could sometimes make out the patter of phantom feet in the hallway.