A Promise at the Grave

“Grandma!

Did you see that hit?” “I saw it, sweetheart,” I said, wiping a smudge of dirt from his cheek.

“Your mom would have been jumping up and down in these bleachers.

I say things like that to Noah often now, small ordinary sentences that keep his mother present in his life, and I have learned that this is one of the most important things I can do for him, maybe the most important.

For a long time I thought my job was to protect him from the sadness of his story, to keep the hard parts away from him, to let him have a childhood unshadowed by everything that had happened.