Remembering Adam, Always

I Googled "28" today. It's a number, just a number. The number between 27 and 29, which, I suppose, makes it somewhat unique.

On the 28th of every month for the last year and a half, I have more often than not thought little about it, at least at first. An ordinary number, an ordinary day, even though, a year and a half ago, just after I had licked the last remnants of nachos off my fingers and given up on the thin film of airy bubbles resting on the bottom of my pina colada glass, just before I was about to settle in for a poolside nap before my next snack, the 28th became anything but ordinary. 28. A number just after 27, the age my friend's son had just turned only a few weeks earlier. A number just before 29, the age my friend's son would never reach. She told me by text that he had died, apologizing but noting there was really no good way to tell me.

Adam would have been 28 now. That is not something I ever thought I would say, all those years ago, when my friend and I spent seemingly endless hours watching our kids play, wishing away the time, some days, so we could feed them dinner and clean up their messes and bathe them and finally relax. When we would call each other for support or advice or just to complain, or, more often than not, to laugh about something one of the kids had said. When we would fill lazy days away from our offices with idyllic trips to museums or the Planetarium or the zoo or just the neighborhood park, lazy days that sometimes made work days seem a welcome respite. Years later, when we visited colleges together, worried together about where they would end up, arranged a celebration for them, together, when they graduated from high school, I would not have believed that Adam would never be 28.

Our plans for this 28th of July have been undecided until yesterday. We will meet, five of us and my friend, at Adam's grave. We will bring our own chairs; my friend will bring the coffees and the treats. We will share memories, we might laugh, we might cry. There's no playbook for visiting the grave of your friend's child, the one who referred to you as his other mom. Or one of his other moms. There is certainly no playbook for my friend's mother, still processing -- without much success -- the loss of her grandson, and her own daughter's pain.

My friend claims that we are the ones who have held her up, helped her make it to this 28th of July, a year and a half later. That day, 18 months ago, when everything went horribly wrong, everything became blurred. I somehow packed my bags and flew back to Chicago and made myself "present" for my friend, and for everybody else caught up in this most surreal fog. I remember very little, except for every word of that text.

The fog has lifted, for the most part, but not one of us has yet to fully accept that Adam died. I have visited his grave before, but still, the reality of it all eludes me. Today, as six theoretically intelligent and strong women gather for coffee around Adam's grave, as the six of us babble incessantly and no more or less incoherently than we usually do, I will think about Adam, rolling his eyes. If he could tell us how ridiculous we look, he would. If he could set us straight, he would. But he will let us do our thing, and he will know how much he is missed.