My wife, Claire, had died seven years earlier in a highway crash, and she had been driving with our little boy, Toby, who was two years old at the time.

Their car had collided with an overturned semi in heavy valley fog, and it had caught fire, and Claire had eventually been identified through dental records.

I never saw Toby’s body.

The police report listed his death as presumptive, because the destruction of the vehicle had been total.

To me, for seven years, my little boy had simply been gone.

I had buried an urn.