It began as a normal day, if any day is truly normal. At least it started out in a predictable way. Got up and walked the dog. During breakfast, my thoughts reached out across the miles to my only child, Lt. Dennis Miller, serving in Iraq. Adding the eight-hour time difference I pictured him in the chow line. How he loved to eat! Had service food dampened his gustatory enthusiasm? A smile touched my lips at the phrase. We loved to play with words. I would remember that phrase for my next letter.

I began the tasks of the day. At midmorning a vague sense of unease led me to the front window, wondering as an unfamiliar black van halted in front of my house. When three marines in dress uniforms got out, time stopped. I stood very quietly as the earth ceased spinning on its axis and revolving around the sun. A sudden crash drew my attention to the floor where the remains of my coffee mug glinted in the morning light. My fingers had no memory of having let it go. The ache in my chest reminded me that I must breathe again.

Another glance out the window and in my mind’s eye the van was transformed into an empty box, a wooden coffin that would bear my son’s broken body home. It would contain his body - or maybe just a pile of dirt from the area where he had been. But his spirit would not be so easy to contain and so the coffin would remain an empty box, as empty as my heart grew at that moment.

The marines tugged on their uniforms to smooth out the wrinkles and solemnly walked in step up the sidewalk and onto the porch. I opened the door before they knocked and went through the motions of inviting them inside. No words were needed. There was only one thing they could have to say. One part of me sat there listening as they provided me some details of what happened. The rest of me watched what unfolded in my living room as though someone else was hearing the news. An explosion while he had stopped to help a child. Several others were hurt, only my son and the child were killed.

Memories flooded in. The day he was born. He had come into this world with a look of determination he had never lost. Until now, I thought. There was a discontinuity between my thoughts and my emotions. His loss had made no impact yet. The first day of school, his first date, his first car, when he left for this tour of duty, shoulders set, proudly decked in his uniform.

The marines remained until friends and family began to arrive. I was not left alone at all for the weeks until his body arrived and the funeral was over.

Now my house is an empty box; walls give it form but nothing is left to fill the space. No more would the sound of feet running down the stairs echo in my heart. No more dirty dishes left piled in the sink, remnants of his love affair with food. My hope for grandchildren would be left unfulfilled. Only memories fill the air, ephemeral, without substance. Perhaps my house isn’t empty after all.

You lose your spouse, you become a widow. When your parents are gone, you are an orphan. There is no word when you lose a child. I guess, at least for a while, you become an empty box.