I never saw it coming. That’s why it hurt so badly.

My son passed away recently on his eighth birthday. It was expected. His diagnosis was terminal and he suffered terrible pain in his last months. <br><br> <br><br>My wife and I didn’t explain his illness to him, we didn’t want him to be anxious about his impending death. He didn’t know that he would never go to high school, or go to college or fall in love or have kids of his own. We were trying to protect him. We figured he didn’t *need* to know that. But now I honestly wonder if we did the right thing. <br><br> <br><br> <br><br>We buried him in a simple, closed casket funeral. He was cremated. But his coffin wasn’t empty. It was full of notes. <br><br> <br><br>My son was a clever kid. You would never know that he was a *special needs* kid. He was always funny, always clever, full of jokes and tricks and puzzles. He loved making art. He spend hours painting and drawing and colouring. As he grew older and his suffering intensified, we started to notice something that we couldn’t ignore. The pictures he was drawing had secret meanings, secret messages. At first we thought it was just him trying to be clever. But the messages were always the same, always positive and uplifting. Stay strong Dad, don’t give up. I love you, I’m not in pain. It’s okay if I die, I’m not afraid. <br><br> <br><br>We talked to his doctors, to the people who looked after him when we couldn’t. We wanted to know if he was saying things to them, things that he wasn’t saying to us. Of course they were bound by client relationships, but we were his legal guardians and we asked nicely. He was saying things like that to them as well. Things he wasn’t saying to us. <br><br> <br><br>So we decided to play along. We started making art of our own. And we wrote our own secret messages, hidden in the paintings, or inside the folded corners of origami. We wrote secrets that only he would see. <br><br> <br><br>I once folded one thousand cranes, and wrote a message on every single crane. Then I hid them in places where he would find them. I wrote things about how proud I am of him, about how I’m doing my best to take care of him, about how strong and brave he is. I wrote things about how much I loved him, how I would miss him so much, how I would never forget him. I wrote funny things, about how he always made me laugh, about how clever he was. When he died we carefully unmade every crane, one at a time, and burned them with his body. <br><br> <br><br>We wrote so many notes for him. So, so many. And the ones we didn’t burn, we buried in his coffin. Thousands of them. Thousands and thousands of little notes. And on every single one, the exact same message. <br><br> <br><br>I love you *more* than yesterday. But *less* than tomorrow. <br><br> <br><br>That was his favourite joke. He would laugh for hours whenever he said that stupid, clever, amazing thing. <br><br> <br><br>Sometimes I wonder what would happen if he found them. But that’s not possible, is it?