My son d/ie/d two years ago, and at 3:07 in the morning last night, my phone rang with the ringtone I had saved only for him, and a voice I knew better than my own whispered, “Mom, open the door, I am freezing out here.”
I woke to the sound with my heart pounding and saw the blue light of my phone glowing on the nightstand beside my bed in my large, mostly silent house outside Santa Barbara, California.
On the screen I saw the name I had not removed from my contacts because deleting it felt like erasing him twice, and it read “Logan” with the small red heart I had added years ago.
My chest tightened so sharply that I had to sit up slowly, because Logan had been declared dead after a boating accident off the Pacific coast, and the ocean had never returned his body to us despite the search teams and the weeks of waiting.
I had organized a memorial service with an empty casket, and I had stood beside a framed photograph of my son smiling into the camera while friends and neighbors offered condolences that felt hollow without a body to bury.