For months, the same strange dog waited beside my son’s grave every Sunday. When I finally followed him home, one familiar face behind a weathered door changed everything I knew.
My name is Diane, and I lost my son Caleb three years ago in a car accident that still doesn’t feel real most mornings when I wake up.
Three years sounds like enough time for a person to understand what happened.
It isn’t.
Some mornings, I open my eyes and reach for my phone before I remember there will never be another message from him.
No late-night question.
No photograph of some terrible meal he was proud of making.
No short text asking if I could transfer $20 because he had somehow spent everything he had.
Then the memory returns.
Caleb is gone.
There are days when that truth arrives gently. Other days, it feels brand new.
He was 19 when the accident happened.
