At the time, I was sitting on his bed, clutching one of his T-shirts. Hearing that he had left something behind felt impossible. I hadn’t heard his voice or seen his face again—and yet, suddenly, it seemed like he still had something he wanted to say.
I lifted Owen’s blue camp shirt to my face just as the phone rang.
It still held a faint trace of his scent. These days, I spent most of my time in his room, surrounded by his textbooks, worn sneakers, baseball cards—and a silence that wasn’t empty, but painfully heavy.
Some mornings, I could almost see him in the kitchen again, flipping a pancake too high and laughing when it landed halfway off the stove. That was the last morning I saw him alive.
He looked exhausted, though he smiled and reassured me when I asked if he was getting enough rest.
For two years, Owen had been fighting cancer. Charlie and I had held tightly to the hope that he would pull through. That’s why losing him at the lake didn’t just take our child—it shattered the future we had already begun to picture.
That day, he went to the lake house with Charlie and some friends. By afternoon, my husband called me, his voice unrecognizable. A storm had come out of nowhere. Owen had gone into the water, and the current swept him away.
Search teams spent days looking, but they found nothing. Eventually, we were given the words families are forced to accept when there are no answers.
Owen was declared gone.
There was no body. No final goodbye.
I completely fell apart. I was admitted for observation, while Charlie took care of the funeral because I couldn’t even stand through it. Without a real farewell, grief doesn’t end—it just keeps coming back in waves.
The ringing phone dragged me back to reality. I glanced at the screen: Mrs. Dilmore.
Owen adored her. Math had become his favorite subject because of her, and he mentioned her at dinner more often than most of his friends.
