Hi, I’m Wayne Jones. Welcome to Lies I Tell My Kids. This is episode 20, “Home Without.”

Everything about the house was different without Shawn there. The door to his bedroom, his former bedroom, was kept closed and for a couple of weeks I was puzzled about that each time I walked past it, just for a microsecond, but I would come to my senses even before my hand had a chance to make it to the doorknob to check on things. In the first days, it froze me in the hallway, staring at my instinctive, obedient hand, until someone else came along or I managed to get myself out of my blank reverie. Later, as the instinct faded, I just turned quickly and went on my way.

It was like the house had changed character and was enforcing its transformation onto us the remaining inhabitants. It was silent most of the time. Mealtimes seemed reverential or stern, depending on the time of day. There was little chit-chat or laughing, and any talk was generally practical. Passing salt. That kind of thing. At the same time as I realized that I was living both a cliché and a trauma that other parents had suffered through many times before us, I still couldn’t help my wallowing. Amid the click and clack of utensils touching against plates, I sat unarmed with just a napkin on my lap, as if it were going to be possible for me to eat enough food so that spilling would be a likelihood. My thoughts spun all over the place, funeral, pool, being helped into my own car that someone else was driving, trying to get a necktie knot perfect when in fact I didn’t give a fuck how it looked.

And in the midst of all that, especially as days became weeks, in the midst and ultimately dominating—it seemed to happen at one single meal, one that shone out from the blur—I looked around the table and everything seemed fine. The brick of tension that I’d had in my gut for so long was not there any more. My beautiful Sadee, the one I loved too much, she was—when I looked up from a plate that had only swooshes of tomato sauce on it now, she was staring at me and smiling. I looked at her first like she was someone I didn’t know, and I had such a rush of wanting her, of expecting her to be in that position right at the other end of the table for me always, that I just guffawed, and then coughed, and then had to clear my throat. But that seemed to break everything and at the same time put it all back together again.

I was laughing so hard now that the coughing seemed like it might be dangerous. In a minute, Sadee was at my side, rubbing my back, patting me on the back, the best medical care she could muster. I accidentally knocked out of her hand the glass of water that she wisely proffered and when that went on the floor, the glass still intact but a slippery mess at my feet, I sat up and was cured like a miracle. I guffawed again but muffled it as best I could. I cleared my throat. And by the time I was smiling, so was she. We all both glad that I was still alive, that I had made it through.

That happened about a year ago and it has become lore for us. Sadee jokes about it. We watch a horror movie with me on the couch, snuggled tight, and at a climactic scene, she’ll say something like, “It looks like the teens are all going to get mangled to death here, so did you want to start laughing right now to get yourself going?”

I am on one or other extreme end of the continuum of recovery. Some days when I think about it, the universe scares me in the power of what it can do, kill a child but cure the grief during a normal meal. And other days I just wonder what the hell got into me.