Out in my driveway, she zipped out the windows of her jacked-up Jeep and put the top down. After goodbyes, hugs and kisses, she hoisted herself up into the cockpit of her macho machine, tied her hair in a ponytail, and put on her baseball cap. Laid out on the empty passenger’s seat were a pack of Marlboro Lights, a liter of Diet Coke, her cell phone and CDs ready to be slipped into the waiting slot, so the music could sway and jive her through the night. She’d already been up since morning and a fifteen-hour drive lay ahead. This was how she liked it—living on the edge, with the wild wind streaming her hair out behind her as she drove 90 mph down dark highways, rap blasting out and cigarette after cigarette her companions as she fled back into her own life.

Her Jeep’s huge tires propped her up above every car and I imagined truckers flashing their lights and blowing their horns. You’re one of us, nighttime babe, taking chances and gearing up, shifting down, flying back to the warmth of the South, leaving the memories.

She needed time to get her own rhythms back. The Jeep made it hard to hear the voices; her hair whipped around and slapped her awake. The wind twirled around her slim young body. It pulsed with life and promise.

Untethered from the past, from moorings that had grown too tight and memories that hurt—fifteen hours of forward motion would do it, would clear her head so she could breathe again. By the end of Virginia, the sun already coming up over the lowlands, she flew headlong down into North Carolina, Galax the next town.

I often wondered what that word meant. Sounded like someone had spelled GALAXY wrong, dropped off the Y, so crucial to the question we had no answer to.

My healing happened in this manner also—hardly noticed in my daily existence but edging ever onward.

Clouds formed in the sky and temporarily blotted out the sun, yet it still rose behind the mist.

In my life, there were setbacks—anniversaries, birthdays, seeing a healthy young man who reminded me of Jeremy or a freckle-faced young boy. Then I retreated and mourned as if his death had happened yesterday—my breath taken away with the power of it. But I rose again, back to the present.

I remembered a jazz concert. I was riveted, listening to the saxophone answer the guitar, so soft, almost a whisper…it pulled me down into my heart. How could I be here, because I was at the hospital taking care of Jeremy. No one in the theater knew my son had died. I sat like everyone else, listening. But I had a secret—I had come from another world, the world of children who weren’t home safe in bed. The guitar understood, the sax blew; yes we understand. Yes, yes, let us take you up, up, let us rock you. Yes, you are here. He is not, not, so sorry, sorry.

The tears came silent and hot, running down my cheeks in the darkened theater.

Like the sun, I continued to climb past the dark clouds and the storms. A deep part of me moved forward. Living it, I couldn’t see where I had come to. Only when I stepped back from my life did I have a glimpse of the grieving mother and realized I had survived. One day I passed a cash machine near 34^th Street where a younger me, mother of a dying child, had sobbed, unable to press the buttons of the ATM machine.

I still grieved but now there were small periods of time where the great weight lifted. Maybe later that day it happened again—small holes in the dark clouds enclosing me, letting in light. I began to believe I might actually come back to life. How could I have survived when he didn’t?

I wasn’t the old me; I was different. Part of this process was getting to know who I had become, to meet the one who walked through the dark. A phrase from Albert Camus, “In the midst of winter, I finally learned that there was in me an invincible summer” gave me hope.

The couches and chairs of the comfortable living room I entered for that first meeting were filled with parents. I was the only one without a partner.

When it was time to introduce myself, I took a deep breath. “I don’t want to be here.” There were nods all around.

Listening to their stories—car accidents, suicide, murder, and illness—I realized that we had all come to the same place from different routes. I found out that 75% of couples that had a child who died, split up. Bernice told us that didn’t happen often in her group. I learned that couples couldn’t deal with each others’ grief; they had too much of their own. They could no longer count upon each other for comfort. I heard a man say he couldn’t be around his wife when she cried. He was barely holding himself together. Another man went into his room and didn’t come out for months. He wailed and wanted no comfort. I heard how this upset his wife. I realized that having a partner didn’t make the grief easier, as I had thought it would. Bernice was the guide with the lantern as we all stumbled along. Her own husband died seventeen years before and there was no support for her grieving back then, which is why she went into counseling.

In everyone’s beaten faces I saw mine looking back and I didn’t feel so alone. I knew I would come back.

As I opened the door, snow swirled around the light. I was staying with Tony who lived a half hour away. I drove down her street, skidding on the hill. I couldn’t find my way back to the highway. Frantic, I drove in loops, moving forward with no direction. I finally calmed down and found the familiar road to Tony’s house.

I saw my daughter Jenny every few weeks. Years later she told me she had no memory of the first few months after Jeremy’s death. She woke up one morning while walking to work but had no idea where she was. Her grief had caused amnesia; her pain was too great. Up to the end, she believed somehow he would live, and ran from his hospital room because she couldn’t watch him die. She regretted this for years, and also the times she didn’t show up because it was too painful to bear.

She told me she had a hard time seeing her father and I grieve. The broken look on our faces was enough to make her turn away. She had nothing to give; was barely holding on herself. Neither of us was available to each other. Our grief was too intense. I remembered what some of the parents at Bernice’s bereavement group had shared: here we were distancing ourselves. We had no comfort to give each other at the time.

The thought crossed my mind, I’m heading for Sloan-Kettering, and then I knew. I had to go, before anything else. Eighteen years had passed since I left there the night Jeremy died, carrying bags of his clothes, while he lay pale and quiet; his struggle over.

I walked up to the doors. A woman wheeled out her bald daughter. I took a deep breath and went in.

The same escalator moved ever upward. I stepped on and was whisked into the lobby. A woman slept on a chair; a man nearby ate lunch. The usual.

I felt like a sleepwalker in another world. Why was I here?

The elevators were in the same place. I pushed the button and waited. A group of white-clothed doctors got on as I pressed the eighth floor button. They talked about someone’s case. When I used to come here, I didn’t pay attention. I was intent on getting to Jeremy. Now I had nothing but time.

At the eighth floor, I followed the others onto the floor. “Excuse me, is this Pediatrics?”

“No,” the nurse said, “that’s one floor up on nine.”

When I got off, I saw glass doors barring my way and a colorful mural of animals and kids playing. Right floor, but I couldn’t open the door. I fumbled around looking for a way in. I wanted to turn away. Why was I even here? Someone came by and pushed a button I hadn’t seen and the doors slid open. I was assaulted with the familiar hospital smells of chemicals and ammonia. Nothing looked as I remembered it. I stood there, not sure of what to do. I wanted to see the room he left from but that was on the floor below.

I headed down the white hall past the nurses station. They looked busy; maybe they wouldn’t notice me.

“Excuse me, where are you going?” I turned and confronted a young nurse leaning over the counter.

I walked up to her. “My son was a patient here. I wanted to come back.” I came closer. “He died here.”

“What was his name,” she asked. I told her. “Just a minute.” She walked back to the nurses’ room. I could see them sitting around having lunch.

A nurse came out and walked over to me. “I remember your son. Was he around nineteen?”

“Yes,” I said.

“My name is Shelley,” she said. “Ann, will you take her on a tour of the floor?”

I had thought of this place for years. Now it seemed smaller and more crowded. We passed a series of closed doors with signs that said Bone Marrow Transplant.  Even the other rooms had closed doors. Other dramas were taking place here. Mine was long over. I realized that I couldn’t linger here so I thanked Ann and let myself out into the elevator bay.

I had visited the scene of Jeremy’s last day, a place I feared and dreamed about. I remembered well how it felt to be tethered to that life, those final hopes. Did I expect to find myself still wandering the halls going to fetch food from the communal refrigerator?

I had come back from another life in a southern city so I could stop pivoting around this memory and move on like my son had.