My dearest Elliot. We meet at the beach. It was always your favourite place. You used to scamper over the sand and jump the waves as a chubby, naked toddler. Later, when you were a little older, you’d spend hours digging the most intricate tunnel networks while your father and I sat in the half-tent and watched sun-kissed families walk by with their matted hair, picnic hampers, and excitable dogs.
It’s the hottest day of the year, but the sun is low now, and soon it will be night. Your father and I are the only ones with the energy to venture out of Aberdyfi. We meet you on the long, empty, unbroken stretch of golden sand where you played as a child, but you’re a young man now. So bright and full of promise. I want to lose myself in your embrace. I long for time to stop and for us to hold each other forever. But we part, and by the glorious sunset that makes everything so perfect, I tell you not to do it.
Please, Elliot. Don’t do this. Let me go.
I look at your father and see the stored years of anguish. I was gone. He’d grieved for me and one day he might have moved on. But you, he never expected to lose you, and I can’t be a substitute for his son. The hole in his heart is vast, and I just don’t fit.
‘Live your life,’ I say. ‘Let me go. Stay with him.’
But then I think about our other children and how they wouldn’t exist but for the choice you made. I think about their every smile and am pained by the idea of a world without them.
As I search for the right advice to give you, the waves roll in, stroking the sand as they have for aeons, and I ponder the choice you faced. The sun falls further, consumed by the distant sea, and darkness begins to creep in.
I died. I was nowhere, with no one, feeling nothing. If there is an afterlife, I wasn’t gone long enough to get there. You gave me a second chance and created a new beginning for me, your father, and your brother and sisters. It makes me so sad you’ll never meet them, nor they you. You’d have loved each other so much.
I thought I knew what I’d say to you, but I don’t any more. I don’t even have the frame of reference to think the way you do. You’ve made a choice that would have broken me, and you’ve done it with calm resolve. I think of all the time we spent with Ben, and never once did you give away your secret. I can’t begin to understand what goes through your mind each day. How you’ve suffered.
How did you find the strength?
What you’ve done, the places you must have been, who you are – these are all beyond me. I won’t presume to tell you what to do, because I can hardly understand how you’ve done it.
Instead, I take your hand.
‘Thank you,’ I say. ‘Thank you for everything you gave us. I love you, Elliot.’
‘I love you too, Mum,’ you reply, and you hug me and your father. ‘I love you both.’
My dream, the happiest of endings, is that the three of us never have to make any difficult choices.
We simply hold each other, and stay in that moment forever.