What I have found is not the end of grief but a way to live alongside it, to carry it the way you carry a stone you have decided not to set down because setting it down would mean forgetting, and I will never choose forgetting.

Some evenings the grief is quiet, a low ache under the beauty of the light.

Some evenings it rises up without warning and takes my breath, and I sit on the swing and let it, and I do not fight it, because the grief is love and I will not refuse my son’s love just because it hurts.

That is the peace I have made: not to be free of the loss, but to be unbroken by it.

To carry Leo, all of him, the joy and the ache together, for the rest of my life, in a house full of light where his drawing hangs on the fridge and his dinosaur sits on his pillow and no one will ever again be permitted to tell me to stop crying, or to pack my things, or to move his life into boxes in the attic to make room for someone else’s.

Julian believed that losing my son would leave me too weak to defend myself.