What it buys is that they have to go somewhere else to tell the truth.
Go be the room where they can say it. Say I’m scared too, and I’m not going anywhere. Say it badly, in a kitchen, crying, with the dishes still in the sink.
Be the person they don’t have to protect.
Because the alternative is that someday a boy in a borrowed red dress is going to stand at a microphone and tell you, in front of a hundred and forty-one people, all the things your child said in a room you were never in.
That’s what I remember now. Not the dress. Not the whispers, and not even my own suspicion.
My son was dying and he still believed that if people were given enough time and enough truth, they’d end up kinder than their first reaction.
That morning, because of Theo, we were.
