"Victor," A Non-Fiction Reflection

It was a busy breakfast, so busy that there were no tables or chairs open in the common space, so my son chose to sit down his waffle and fruit selection on a modern sectional in the lobby. The weather was beautiful, a sunny 75 at 8:45 in the morning, no chilly breezes. After throwing our overnight bags in the trunk, grandpa and I came back through the automatic doors to find a victor, sitting on the edge of an open sofa, staring into a nowhere to his far left, thinking.

And I too was thinking, deeply... not because there was so much to do on this particular day and not because of all the new faces we were going to see... but because of the face we would not. I had seen the grief arrive and park like a fast train when he got out of bed that morning. It made him move slowly. It made him feel heavy. It made him unable to celebrate that he had completed one lap of many laps. It taunted him without mercy, saying So, you have finished one challenge. There will be another, and you might lose.

It was easy to identify his state of mind because throughout the previous day and night, the same grief had assailed me, reminding me all at once of the cost we used to pay as a trio--Mother, Father, Son--to achieve such an honor, such an academic distinction. It was a painful process of home studies, summer practice schedules, choke-tight curfews, choice and consequence, cancelled weekend trips, rushed test preps and late-night accountability talks. It was are you thinking about your future wrap sessions at 6 a.m. It was a ride we started together, swinging... taking hard hits at times and being found wanting, lacking, beaten and saturated... but it started with three.

Today, on this day, only two remained, and it didn't matter then that after the fight there was something to celebrate. Not just yet. What mattered was taking that seat next to my son on that sectional, sitting catty cornered and finding my own nowhere into which to peer. It was a strange feeling. Just eight years ago, he was small enough to gather up into my arms and rush down the stairs when he was ailing. Now he sat by me, a set of shoulders that stood higher than mine in profile, wearing his father's chain, a young man into whose eyes I must look up into... and in that moment in time, the grief rested equally upon us like a great, descending robe.

I wanted to be prolific, but I didn't have the wherewithal to say anything worth remembering. I decided to settle on the truth. You have to deal with one piece of stress at a time, son. It is enough that today you are starting a new path in life. Let's try to enjoy that and deal with the grief later. It is your day. The odds were against us, but we made it. Your father would be proud... all these being things that I'd had to say to myself when I too got out of bed that morning feeling as if I'd survived a great car accident and wasn't supposed to.

There were tears, sure. We hid them in our own ways... him by dabbing his eyes between breakfast bites and me by rehearsing a don't fall apart speech on repeat in my mind. We were brave for each other, like mother and son would be. On this particular occasion, it became painfully obvious to both us, perched there on the sofa, that we had won something and lost everything. The fresh starting point was pristine and sparkling, having never been ran, but we were walking up to it wincing and battered, lanced open in places from the previous trials. It was hard to lift up our hands and be champions in the presence of the pain. It was hard to be proud and be broken.

So, we sat quietly, and I let him know that the magnitude of the moment could not, would not make sense until he had lived longer and seen more. This was true, because I would not have understood it if I had not lived longer and seen more. And we faced the day, winners, awash in the bitterness of missing our chief contender, flooded with sadness over what we could not recover, sore from the heavy lifting of the last ten months, bleeding.

-T. D. James-Moss