There are five people in my family now.

But every night, I still reach for the sixth plate.

He left before I ever saw the color of his eyes. Before I ever heard his first cry. Before I could teach him how to throw a ball, or hold his hand the day he became a man. His name was JR, and his absence is the heaviest thing I have ever carried.

To You, My Son is not a book about the day a son died. It is about the ten thousand days that came after. It is about the haunting, beautiful, and unbearable reality of outliving your own child.

It is about the quiet ways grief infiltrates a house—in the space at the dinner table no one sits in, in the grocery store aisle where a mother’s laughter over a box of cereal brings a grown man to his knees. It is about the unanswerable questions that echo in the dark: Why him and not me? What would his voice sound like? How do I bury a son without burying myself alongside him?