The room went quiet.
My son Jack died 17 days after his 18th birthday.
Cancer.
Fourteen months from diagnosis to funeral.
It still feels obscene to reduce his life to those facts.
Jack loved old horror movies and burned grilled cheese because he refused to cook it on low heat.
He hated tomatoes but ate ketchup on everything.
He could name almost every capital city in the world and couldn’t remember to bring his laundry downstairs.
And Theo had been beside him for most of it.
The boys met when they were seven.
Theo lived four houses down.
By ten, he practically lived at ours.
He slept in our spare room so often that I eventually stopped calling it the spare room.
It became “Theo’s room.”
His home life wasn’t easy.
