Who was gone.
Not the way most people lose someone. Not with a hospital room and a last conversation and the terrible, sacred weight of a goodbye. Owen went to the lake house with my husband Charlie and a group of friends on what started as an ordinary Saturday in early September. By afternoon, a storm had come in fast off the water, the kind that happens without warning in that part of Virginia, and the current had taken my son before anyone could reach him.
Charlie called me from the shore. I heard the weather in the background and his voice coming apart at the seams, and I understood before he finished the sentence.
Search teams worked for four days.
They found nothing.
They explained, in the kind, exhausted way of people who have had to explain this before, what fast currents do. They used words and phrases that were meant to bring closure and brought only a specific kind of devastation that has no clean name — the devastation of a mother who cannot kiss her child’s face one final time, who has no place to go and stand and be near him.
