My nineteen year-old son is a sophomore at a college a few hours drive from where I live. The campus is huge, spread across many tree-lined blocks. My wife and I both went to far smaller schools, and were surprised when our firstborn chose a university so large, but it has the programs he wanted and awarded him a modest but much appreciated scholarship.

It’s also the perfect distance from home: close enough for a quick visit, far enough away that he has to do his laundry himself.

That closeness became important this month. Towards the end of winter break, a good friend and classmate of my son was killed in a car accident. My son’s encountered deaths before—both my aging parents in less than two years, followed by a boy who knew from grade school—but this was more immediate, closer to his heart, leaving him so much more to grieve.

“It’s been hard,” he told me this weekend when I visited: finding his friend’s sweatshirt in a corner of the laundry room or discovering what is likely the last picture of the boy alive: a snapshot of him smiling, standing beside my son. Hardest of all was the day the boy’s parents drove to the fraternity house to collect their son’s belongings. He couldn’t describe that scene beyond merely naming it—what words could bear the burden of such desolation?—but naming was sufficient to shatter our hearts as well.

Yes, my son joined a social fraternity, an experience his introvert father never had nor remotely wanted. I remember the sheepish, almost apologetic tone in his voice when he called last year to tell us he’d pledged. He quickly described the fraternity’s charitable activities and how underclassmen were strongly encouraged to participate in Sunday in-house study sessions, but I knew these weren’t his primary reasons for joining. My son’s been a schmoozer since the moment he could talk—a big-hearted, confident social networker who knows the value of knowing someone who knows someone. He’s an apple who, in this respect at least, rolled a long way from the tree.

His fraternity and the big-heartedness which led him there have been two-edged swords this past month. He has friends to talk to, “to share,” as he says, “the things we’ve lost that still make us smile.” And he’s opened up to his parents more readily than I imagined, a gift I treasure though I wish with all my heart it arrived through other means. But the fraternity house itself, with its heavy odor of spilled drinks and testosterone, seems an inhospitable setting for the hard work of grieving, while my son’s heavy heart leaves little energy for the tasks of a new and busy semester.

On my visit, though, we were blessed with time to talk, sharing meals or watching uninspiring college basketball games on television. It’s best to have some small business at hand—washing the dishes, perhaps, or tending to simple needs—at such times. It affords a freeing indirection to weighty words.

Sunday morning, I went to mass at the campus parish. Children formed the choir and shared the readings. I’m always more at ease around kids, but this morning they stole more than their usual share of my heart. Their parts were well practiced, and even when a girl, who couldn’t have been more than ten years old, briefly stumbled over the word “Deuteronomy,” she quickly recovered and moved on, finishing her passage with the confidence of a bat mitzvah.

Later, after brunch with my son and a brief farewell before he set off to study, I started on the two-lane highway back home. Fields, empty save for the stubble from last year’s harvest, slept under snow. A pileated woodpecker twisted on a slender, naked tree branch, grasping with its bill at something to eat. A doe lay dead in the gravelly space between pavement and the blackened roadside snow bank.

I remembered the poem a dear friend read at a recent gathering: Ellen Bass’s “After our Daughter’s Wedding,” in which the speaker recalls weeping after the happy event. When asked if her sadness comes from “giving her daughter away,” she disagrees: “it was that she made it there,” cataloging ways her child might have died in her exodus from childhood.

“It’s animal,” she continues:

The egg
not eaten by a weasel. Turtles
crossing the beach, exposed
in the moonlight. And we
have so few to start with.
And that long gestation—
like carrying your soul out in front of you.
All those years of feeding
and watching. The vulnerable hollow
at the back of the neck. Never knowing
what could pick them off—a seagull
swooping down for a clam.
Our most basic imperative
for them to survive.
And there’s never been a moment
we could count on it.

As a pediatrician, I’ve seen children die, some right in front of me, all my science and training powerless to save them. An unborn child strangles on its umbilical cord before it can be delivered, a strapping schoolgirl comes to the hospital one night with pneumonia and dies by sunrise.

Pediatrics grew more difficult after I became a father, supplying a disturbing emotional context whenever I confront a seriously ill child. Parenthood offers an infinity of reminders that life, while wondrous, is first and always a terribly fragile thing.

I’m praying for my son, keeping in touch, reminding him when I can, with words uncharacteristically unguarded, how much he is loved. Jill and I want him to continue growing, out past the orbit of our parental responsibility. Even more desperately, though, we want him to be safe, to survive, to flourish, even though we know there’s never been, nor will there ever be, a moment we could count on it.