“He wasn’t faking the hopeful stuff.”
I looked at him.
“He wanted college. He wanted Japan. He talked about Japan like constantly, he had a whole thing about the trains. He genuinely thought the treatment might work.”
And then:
“He just also knew it might not.”
Both at once.
My eighteen-year-old son had figured out, somewhere in that bedroom with that boy, that hope and fear are not opposites and that you can carry both of them in the same body at the same time.
I was forty-three years old at that funeral and I had not managed it. I had been treating hope like a thing you’d break if you looked at the truth.
He’d gotten there at seventeen.
I Asked Theo Two Questions and the Second Answer Was a Pause
“Did he talk about dying a lot?”
“No.”
“Really? Theo, you can tell me.”
“Three times. Maybe four. That’s it, I swear.”
