Lu is asleep on the couch.  The cats lie on her, giving warmth and heartbeats and comfort.  We are alone tonight.

I have never heard a deathly silence before.

It lies in the quiet between every word, now, and on a night like this it is even more clear. I hear who isn’t here.

It is mind-wrenching to think about Silas but it is all we can do when we can’t hear him, can’t see him, can’t touch him, can’t love him.  We are trapped in a paradox of boundless love and endless death.  Somewhere in there we have to carve out a space we can breathe in for now, and perhaps someday we will decorate it with hope and memory and peace.

I can suddenly feel the weight of Time.  I know the growing space between Silas’ brief life and where we stand right now.  It is as though we are being pulled away from him, even though he was lost to us right away.  It feels like a betrayal to continue forward, that we have no choice but to be swept downstream, away from the moments in Time when he was here with us on Earth.

Sadness is settling into our lives, like the whisps of cat hair under the coffee table.  I can feel it brush through the room, see it on the sunlight, taste it in the water.  I don’t understand how I can be in the world with all of these other people around and none of them are Silas.

This life we are now living is so nonsensical it is dizzying.  My gut will just drop away like I’m on a roller coaster when I think about my missing son.  Whoosh, gone, and we are flying along, racing forward in Time.  I can feel it all the way through me: the blazing pace of life plummeting into the quiet stillness of death.  Over and over again.

It is a steep curve and it is unpleasant because we know we will be on this ride for the rest of our lives.  But we don’t bother screaming every time we feel it, anymore.  It would disturb the deathly quiet in our hearts where we have to listen for Silas.

The only sounds we hear, though, are the full-throated shouts of our friends and family telling us they love us, that they are there for us, that somehow or another they will get us off this hellish ride and that we will be safe and warm again someday soon.

The same Time that pulls us from our son will also someday heal us.  Love and Time are the only cures for the frigid, empty, sad wind that blows through us tonight.  We can feel the love, but the time isn’t right.  Nothing is right tonight, without Silas.