It has been 572 days since my son died, and I still don’t know how to explain what it’s like to live inside this kind of absence. My grief feels both abstract and concrete—so uncomfortably quiet it sometimes feels unbearably loud. When I try to name it, grief scatters into too many fragments: big things that can’t be tackled with words, and mountains of tiny things that become enormous when stacked up for hundreds of days. Words fail.

But I know what it feels like in my body. I woke in the darkness on Thanksgiving night calling his name out loud—“Tom! Tom?” I don’t recall the dream, but I can still hear my own desperate, searching tone. When I slowly became aware of myself and my surroundings, I fell into deep sobs for the first time in…I don’t know how long. That is how the waves of grief come for me: I can forget to cry for a long time, but it eventually finds me again, even in my sleep.

Other days, instead of an ambush, grief slips into ordinary conversations. Recently, a friend casually mentioned that their son doesn’t want them to buy his pants and t-shirts anymore. What a normal thing parents might say as their kid grows up! It silently crushed me and filled me with secret hurt. Did they notice? I don’t know. But the truth remains that I’ll never buy my son anything, ever again.

This is the truth of where I am, 572 days later: still living in a world that keeps moving without him; still absently calling out his name; still navigating normal conversations like I’m covered in gaping wounds.

Grief has become part of the air I move through—familiar, persistent and shaped like love. Even when the words are hard to find, I am carrying Tom with me. In the waking moments. In the dreams. In the gaps between what people say and what I hear. In everything I still do and everything I will never do again.

Tom is gone. And Tom is here.
572 days later, both remain true.