Fifty-One Hours

For eleven months, the thing that had comforted me most was that he had not been alone.

That was the load-bearing piece.

There had been no him, so there had been no loneliness, so there was nothing to have failed at.

And what I got on a garage floor was fifty-one hours in which there was a him, and in which he was in a room without his mother, and in which a great many kind and competent strangers did everything for him that I should have been doing.

I have had to be walked away from that particular sentence about nine times.