I gave my son’s friend’s mom a hug at the memorial service earlier this week. She was beautiful, and generous, and gracious. She asked how my kids were. Did you catch that? She asked about my kids. She said she held so many special memories of my son when he was little. I watched her mill around the room; she must have gotten 100 hugs.

I bet she is exhausted. She has to be exhausted.

Her boy died December 7. Pictures of him rolled across a big screen. Baby. Toddler. Halloween. Christmas. Summers. Family. Friends. Sports. So much life. There were hundreds of people there. Might turn out to be a Covid super-spreader event; nobody seemed worried about that, though. It was a blessed sunny day between rainy ones. Rainy days in California? No complaints from anyone about that. (That’s not true. I’m sure someone somewhere was complaining.) But it was sunny, and the parking lot of the golf course where the reception was held was full, and people had to park on the street and on the dirt in the field across the way.

There were turkey sandwiches and stuffed mushrooms, a salad with baby greens, walnuts, and cranberries. Enough food for everyone. A no host bar.

We weren’t planning to eat. We didn’t care about the food. We weren’t hungry, even though it was lunchtime. But then we got in line and ate anyway. We ate and talked with old friends: people I hadn’t seen in years. There were generations of people there. Dante’s sister was four years older than him, and she knew some of my daughter’s friends, so there was that contingency of people that my daughter knew, and some of their parents. That part was lovely, actually: the reconnecting with folks who used to be a near constant part of my weeks, connections that disappeared once my daughter graduated and we didn’t see each other at practices and sports banquets anymore.

But it was a terrible way to see friends again.

Just about the worst thing that can happen to a person is to lose a child. There are no words, no cards, no GoFundMe drives, no flowers or casseroles that can ease that pain. Dante’s mom and dad and sister and the rest of his sweet family have entered a new, terrible land; no one can follow, no matter how much we want to help. Sure, there are support groups for folks who have lost children, but nobody can truly know or understand their specific grief or pain. It is acute, and it will be chronic. All of us send “thoughts and prayers,” and maybe those do something, especially the prayers. But his family has passports to a country that nobody wants to visit, one that they have to walk through and live in alone. We would do anything to change this for them, but there is nothing. Nothing we can do to bring him back to us.

Rest in peace, sweet Dante. You were deeply loved, are still deeply loved. All of us were blessed by your light.