Son of the Water

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Prologue: To the Parent with Empty Hands

There is a silence known only to a parent whose child has passed away. It is no ordinary silence where nothing is heard; it is a numbing, massive void that crushes the air from your lungs. A lead brick on your chest that cuts off your breath. A centrifuge in your stomach spinning so violently it makes you sick to your core, with stabs through your heart so vicious you literally gag from misery.

A silence in which the world around you keeps on turning—people rushing to work, laughing in the street, fussing over trivialities—while your entire universe has just shattered into a thousand pieces.

If you have opened this book, I know why you are here.

Perhaps your little one passed before taking their first earthly breath, safe and still in the warmth of your womb. Perhaps you let go of your baby in the cold light of an incubator, or your two-year-old toddler slipped away on an operating table while surgeons fought for a miracle. Perhaps tragedy struck when your child was fourteen, on their bicycle, on the sports field, or through an insidious illness that stole every spark of youth. Or perhaps you lost a young adult of twenty-one on a freezing-cold night, just as I did.

Hear what I am telling you, from the depths of my heart: the form death took does not matter.
The age on the headstone does not matter.
The tear in your soul is the very same tear as the one in mine. The physical cramp in your belly, the overwhelming urge to wrap your arms around emptiness, the whispered guilt in the dead of night: “What should I have done differently?”—we share the same wound. You are not alone here.

When my son Mickey passed away on February 22, 2022, in his twenty-second year, I thought my life was over. I thought the most I could ever hope for was to endure the days ahead as a broken shadow of who I once was. But the universe had another plan. Mickey had another plan.

What I share in this e-book is how I have come to see it. Take what resonates, and leave behind whatever does not fit (yet).

Amid the ruins, the greatest reversal a human being can experience took place.
All those years, I had been his mother. I had cared for him, made him coffee when he couldn't get out of bed, cherished him, and tried to shield him from the harshness of the world. But when he laid down his physical body and dissolved into the great light, he became greater than I could ever have imagined. He outgrew our earthly roles. The boy I held became my teacher. The son became the guide.

Today, I am no longer the one carrying him. Mickey carries me.
He lets me know in the language of the soul. Whenever doubt creeps in, his unmistakable signature appears: 2222. Four twos. The sacred cosmic portal of the day he left: the twenty-second day of the second month in the year twenty-two. A master number of ultimate balance, whispering through the veil:

“I am here. I see you. The divine order is right. I am carrying you now.”

This book is not a lament for what has been lost. It is a torch in the darkness. It is an invitation to you, dear parent, to discover that death is not the end of the relationship with your child, but the beginning of an entirely new, timeless connection.
Your child has not been destroyed; they have been transformed.

And they are not asking you to wither away in the dark, but to shine their light through your eyes out into the world.

You could say the loss broke me down to the bone, but the truth is greater: it stripped me down to my soul. It did not defeat me; it kissed me awake. I stood up with my chin held high, full of pride, rooted in an inner strength that can no longer be shaken. I no longer live on autopilot. I live for two.

Take my hand. Let us walk through the shadows together, back toward the light.
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