…an empty casket.”
I sat up in bed and read the messages until the sun came up. Eight years of them.
Michael was twenty-two when he “died.” A car accident on a rural highway, my husband, Paul, told me. Closed casket. Too much damage. Paul handled everything with his brother, who owns a funeral home two towns over. I never saw my son’s body. I never questioned it. Grief doesn’t ask questions.
Michael didn’t die in a car accident. He’d been arrested. For armed robbery. At a gas station, high on pills, with a friend. Nobody was hurt. He got eight years in a state prison three hundred miles away.
And Paul, who’d always been terrified of what people would think, couldn’t stand the shame. He told me Michael was dead. He used his brother’s funeral home to stage a closed-casket service. He told his son, in prison, that I’d “disowned” him. That I said I never wanted to see him again.
For eight years, my son believed his mother had abandoned him. For eight years, I visited an empty grave every month.
Michael had been released three months ago. He’d been sober the whole eight years. He’d earned a college degree inside. He’d started writing to his father, begging to see me. And Paul kept saying no. “She’s not ready. She’ll never forgive you.”
I didn’t wake Paul. At 6 a.m., I picked up his phone and wrote back to my son. “This is Mom. I never disowned you. I thought you were dead. I’m coming to you. Tell me where you are.”
He called me thirty seconds later. He was crying so hard he couldn’t say anything for almost a minute. Then he said, “Mom?”
He was living in a halfway house two hours away. I drove there that morning without telling Paul. I saw him across the parking lot. Thirty years old. Thinner. My eyes. His father’s chin. He ran.
I held my son in a halfway house parking lot for twenty minutes. Neither of us said anything at all.
I filed for divorce the next week. Paul said he’d done it to “protect me.” I told him he’d protected himself. His brother’s funeral home is being investigated by the state for falsifying a death record.
Michael lives with me now. He works at a recovery center, helping other men coming home from prison. He goes to meetings every week. He’s been sober for eight years and four months.
Last Sunday, we went to the cemetery together. To the empty grave with his name on it. He stood there looking at his own headstone for a long time.
“What do we do with it?” he asked.
I’d been thinking about that for weeks. “We have it changed,” I said. “I’d like it to say something else.”
It says something else now. “Michael Anderson. Welcome home.”
