Rory asked me once, not long after we hung it, whether it made me sad to look at it.
It was a serious question, asked in the serious way he asks things, and I thought about it before I answered, because he deserved a real answer and not a comforting one.
I told him the truth: that it used to, at first, and that now it mostly made me proud, and that both of those things could be true at the same time about the same square of cloth.
He nodded, satisfied, in the way of a child who is relieved to learn that complicated feelings are allowed.
And then he said something I have kept: that he didn’t want to forget the notes, because forgetting them would be like saying the brave thing never happened.
He was right, of course.
He is right about a great many things.
We did not frame the shirt to remember the man who forced it.
We framed it to remember the boy who defeated him — and to remind ourselves, on the ordinary days, that the two of us had once stood together in the worst room of our lives and walked out of it whole.
A child should grow up knowing a thing like that about himself.