Two: your grief is an explanation and it is not a defense, and you have to hold both. I was running on nine hours of sleep across seventeen days and I am never going to tell another grieving parent that they should have been better than their worst instinct.
But I had a worst instinct and I nearly acted on it, and the only reason I didn’t is that my husband happened to stand up first and gave me something to grab. If he’d stayed seated, I might have been the one who moved, and there’s a version of that morning where Theo Vance gets walked out of a chapel by a funeral director and Jack’s last joke dies in a parking lot.
That version was about four seconds away. I think about that constantly.
Three: my son knew he might die and he spent six months building a joke so that the saddest room of his life would have one laugh in it, and he never told his mother because he thought she couldn’t take it — and he was right.
