Saving Noah

by Lucinda Berry

In the past few years, Lucas spent more time with her than I did. He’d been taking care of her since my father died. My parents were together for thirty-eight years, and she had relied on my dad for everything. He’d always taken care of her, and she was lost without him. I expected it to get easier for her over time, but it didn’t. It’d been five years since he died, but my mother struggled to make it through each day. I used to think it was sweet that Lucas was there for her like he was—shoveling her snow in the winter, mowing her lawn in the summer, fixing things around the house, managing her finances—but it all changed when our family needed him, and he couldn’t be there for us in the same way. How could he care for her like he did and ignore his own son?

weirdo behavior

Time had dragged. Nobody told me time slowed down with tragedy and how each minute became excruciating when it was painful to merely exist. Just when I was gaining my footing, something would remind me of it and send me into an emotional tailspin.

I don’t know what scares me more—some kind of afterlife or nothing at all.

Ouch...same.

It had been almost a year since Noah died and it was a lie that time healed all wounds. Whoever said it originally never lost a child. The wound cuts too deep to ever go away.

But I had to go on for Katie, because being a mother means you live your life as a living sacrifice.

Being his parent didn’t stop after he died, and it was my job as his mother to protect his memory in the same way I protected him while he was alive.

There had to be a God, because there had to be a heaven. A time when I got to see him again, and he was the one to walk me home.