The words can hardly form in her mouth for the grief. You know. You see his white hair, the pink of his scalp. An emptiness begins opening. You don’t feel it at first, but you see it widening as time stretches, suspending you in this moment between unreality and the inevitable real of the fact.

It hits with the force of a punch. You let it. You want it. This is the last genuine expression of love you will have with his existence as it slips from you. You and your mom, babbling the language of loss through the phone.

He is an absence in the world. The rest of the day, the absence weaves in and out of abstraction because his presence lived half-way across the country. You hold even for moments. This one. Another one. Another. You book a ticket back to Texas. “I should have stayed,” you think. “I knew I should have stayed.” A sudden nostalgia for the hell of ICU. Then, the retching reality. Uncontrollable. Condolences leave you shaking, bracing yourself. No images, no sound, or all of the images and all of the sounds. Pure emotion sucking out your insides. You think “too much.” Then you think, “is ‘too much’ at all possible? Is there ever ‘too much’ to fully express this loss?” Too much is not possible.

This moment can be borne. This is bearable. Then it is not. You wonder when, then worry that, it will. Bearable cheapens his life, his love, he being.

The pure, prosaic commonness of it all shocks you the most. So, perhaps it is a moment of poetry that you spend the end of your first day without him, he who took you on your first plane ride in your first months of life, in an airport.