It was the erasure that came from his never having been real to them at all.

To Julian and Chloe, my son had been a fact of their inconvenience while he lived and a piece of background clutter once he died, and the drawing on the fridge was, to them, just an object in a house they were redecorating.

And I understood, looking at that photograph, that if I did not fight, that is what would happen to all of him — that his room would become a nursery, his things would go to the attic and then to the trash, his drawing would come down when they finally noticed it, and the entire fact of Leo, the whole bright unbearable miracle of my son’s four years on this earth, would be quietly painted over to make room for their fresh start.

I could not save his life.

But I could refuse, with everything I had, to let them erase that he had lived.

And I did.