The Gate Agent Who Saw What I Couldn’t

A Son Three States Away

Cameron calls me every Sunday evening. He has done it since he left for college and never stopped, not through two moves, one divorce he later remarried out of, and a career that keeps him at his desk later than I think is good for anybody. I love that about my son. I want to say that clearly too, because it would be easy, in the telling of this, to make him sound like someone he is not.

But the calls had changed since Cecil died. They used to be about football scores and his wife’s garden and whether I had gotten the water heater looked at. Somewhere in the last year they had turned into something closer to an inspection. How is the driveway. Have you had the truck serviced. Do you have somebody who checks on you. Are you eating. Who is helping you calve in the spring.

I answered every question honestly and every answer seemed to satisfy him less than the one before it. I did not understand, for most of that year, that Cameron was not actually asking about the driveway or the water heater. He was asking, in the only language he had for it, whether the field that took his father was going to take his mother too, and he was not getting an answer that let him stop being afraid.

Grief does strange things to a person’s hands. Some people can only hold it by doing something with it. Cameron’s father died of standing still too long in the cold, alone, and I have come to believe that somewhere around month ten or eleven, my son decided the antidote to that was speed. If he could just move fast enough, get ahead of the next bad thing far enough in advance, maybe he could out plan the kind of morning that had taken his father.