Tomorrow, it will be one month since that dreadful telephone call. The details of which are seared into my memory for all time. It is all so fresh, I can’t believe the time has passed. But time is always relative. As Einstein said,

“Put your hand on a hot stove for a minute and it will seem like an hour. Sit with a pretty girl for an hour and it will seem like a minute. That’s Relativity”

Yep. Each day seems like a year while it is passing, (the hot stove) but when I add them up, it is only a moment ago that I was playing golf with him, (the pretty girl) watching the sun set over San Jacinto mountain. Sadly, this month hasn’t really brought any new insights. No ‘resolution’, no ‘healing’, just the daily ambushes of grief. Oh, there have been moments of what you might call ‘happiness’, laughs, experiences of beauty, moments of calm here and there, a remembrance of something Jake did or said that elicit a pleasant memory, but everything is wrapped in Saudade now. Those wonderful memories also spark that melancholy that lies within.

Tomorrow will be difficult. Wednesday even more so, it marks the end of the “shloshim“, the 30 days of Jewish mourning. We will go to the cemetery to say Kaddish again, bid another farewell to our son, and do our best to get on with it. There may be a small gathering at the shul afterward, a chance for friends and family who miss him too to share a moment with us, maybe not. I don’t know if we are up to it. But others grieve too. For their loss of Jake. People who knew him well, people who only met him a couple of times, people who knew him from early childhood, people who knew him from birth, people who befriended him in later years, all people who loved him. Everyone feels the loss, their lives just a little bit lessened by his departure. And that may have been his greatest gift. The ability to connect with people. To make a friend in an instant. To be a loyal and caring friend no matter how long or how well he knew you. To become a little (or big) part of you, and to take a part of you into his heart. He was every man’s son. He was every mother’s son. He was welcome everywhere he went. I am sure he is welcome wherever he is now.