If you’d asked me that gray October afternoon what grief felt like, I would’ve told you it was weight. Not the dramatic kind people talk about in movies—no wailing in the rain, no collapsing into someone’s arms. Just weight.
In your chest. In your bones. In your hands when you reach for something familiar and remember the person who owned it is gone.
That day, the weight came wrapped in an envelope. “Warren Parker only,” the funeral director said, pressing it into my palm like it might bite. I stared at my own name on the front, black ink on cream paper, and for a second my brain refused to accept that this was real—refused to accept that my son could leave me anything at all because my son wasn’t supposed to be someone who left.
He was supposed to outlive me. Donovan was the kind of man people described with their whole face—eyes wide, voice full. “Brilliant.” “Good-hearted.” “The kid who never forgot where he came from.” He’d been the kind of boy who fixed broken toys for other kids, then grew into the kind of man who fixed entire systems.
MIT graduate. Twelve patents. Automotive engineer with the kind of mind that saw problems like puzzles and people like responsibilities.
And still—still—he’d stop at Pete’s gas station every Friday on his way home, just to ask about the Tigers and help someone who couldn’t afford a mechanic. That was my kid. And now his funeral was over.
People shuffled in slow circles beneath the fluorescent lights of Henderson Funeral Home—neighbors from Maple Street, my old coworkers from the Ford plant, engineers Donovan had mentored who looked like they couldn’t understand how someone like him could be reduced to a casket and a program. Old Pete stood with tears carving tracks down his weathered cheeks. “He was a good boy, Warren,” he whispered at the viewing.
“Smart as a whip, but he was still your boy.”
I nodded because my throat didn’t work. Mrs. Henderson—Helen—had driven me there, insisting I shouldn’t be alone.
She’d been my neighbor since before my hair went gray, and she had that sharp, gentle kind of loyalty you only get from people who’ve lived through winters together. After the service, we gathered for the reading of the will in a small side room that smelled like coffee and lilies. Delilah sat beside me.
The story doesn’t end here –
it continues on the next page.
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