I lost my son, Evan, two years ago, three weeks before his eighth birthday.
Even now, there are mornings when I wake up and forget for a few seconds.
I hear a truck outside and think it is his school bus. I walk past the cereal aisle and reach automatically for the chocolate puffs he loved. Sometimes I still turn toward his room when I hear the floor creak.
Then I remember.
And somehow, remembering never gets easier.
Every Sunday morning, I drive to the cemetery with a small bunch of yellow flowers on the passenger seat.
Evan loved yellow. Yellow shirts, yellow balloons, yellow candy wrappers. Once, when he was five, he told me yellow was “the happiest color because it looks like the sun is trying.”
So yellow flowers became our thing.
For the first year after he died, I went alone.
Then the dog appeared.
He was a scruffy golden retriever mix with dirty fur around his legs and one ear that bent slightly forward. He had no collar and no tag.
The first time I saw him, he was lying beside Evan’s headstone.
I assumed he belonged to another visitor.
But when I came back the following Sunday, he was there again.
And the Sunday after that.
And the one after that.
Sometimes he was curled up asleep. Sometimes he sat quietly facing the cemetery path, as though he was waiting for someone.
But he was always beside Evan.
Never another grave.
Just his.
I asked the groundskeeper if he knew the dog.
He shook his head.
“Been seeing him around for months,” he told me. “Doesn’t bother anybody.”
I posted a picture online. I asked people who lived near the cemetery. I even called two local shelters.
No one claimed him.
Eventually, I started bringing an extra bottle of water and some dog food.
“Here you go, buddy,” I would say, setting it beside Evan’s flowers.
He ate only after I stepped away.
He never let me pet him.
He never followed me.
For nearly a year, that was our strange little routine.
Me.
My son’s grave.
And a dog that seemed to miss him too.
My older sister, Janice, thought I was making too much of it.
“Corinne, he’s a stray,” she told me one evening. “You’re turning him into something because you’re still hurting.”
Maybe she was right.
Janice had been there through almost everything.
During Evan’s illness, she drove us to appointments when I was too tired. She picked up groceries. She sat at the hospital when I needed to shower or go home for fresh clothes.
After he died, she handled things I could barely look at.
Bills.
Forms.
Insurance paperwork.
Even some of Evan’s belongings.
“Let me take care of the hard things,” she always said.
And I let her.
I was grateful.
At least, I thought I was.
Then yesterday afternoon, while I was hanging laundry in the backyard, I heard scratching against the wooden gate.
At first, I ignored it.
Then it came again.
Scratch.
Scratch.
Scratch.
I wiped my hands on my jeans and walked over.
When I opened the gate, my breath caught.
It was him.
The cemetery dog.
For the first time in a year, he had left Evan’s grave and come to me.
Something was hanging gently from his mouth.
A small stuffed rabbit.
Its gray fabric was dirty, one ear almost torn through, and most of the fur had worn away around its belly.
My hands started shaking before I even touched it.
“No,” I whispered.
The dog lowered his head and placed it carefully at my feet.
I knew that rabbit.
Evan had called him Mr. Hops.
He slept with that ridiculous little thing from the time he was three until he was almost seven.
Then one day, it disappeared.
I searched everywhere.
Under his bed.
Behind the couch.
Inside boxes in the garage.
Janice helped me look.
At least, I remembered her telling me she had.
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