Now I want to hear from you.
Here’s what I still turn over, five years on. My son told his best friend he thought he was going to die, and he never once told me — because he decided his mother needed hope more than she needed the truth, and he was right about that, and I taught him he was right by performing certainty in front of him for fourteen months. Was he protecting me, or did I make myself into a person my own dying child couldn’t be honest with?
And the one I really want argued out in the comments on the Facebook video: Theo kept that promise for six months and never told us — not in March, not in April, not in the seventeen days after Jack died. He showed up in that dress and let a room full of adults stare at him rather than warn us first. Some people tell me a promise to a dying friend outranks everything and he did it exactly right. Others tell me a seventeen-year-old should have knocked on our door the week before and said “here’s what Jack asked me to do,” and spared all three of us that morning. Which is it?
