My Turn: Eileen Trupia of Ronkonkoma imagines the man her son would have been 

Marking my son’s death anniversary has a symmetry this year.

He died at age 20, and he’s been dead for 20 years. What would Charles be like at 40? Should I imagine who he’d be with schizophrenia or without it? A loved one with a mental illness has already morphed from the person you knew, which makes it hard to imagine who they would have become.

He ended his life before he felt even less like himself. Would he be an artist? A support group leader? A fun dad? A homeless wanderer? All are possibilities, depending on which Charles I choose to imagine.

I’ve changed, too, of course. After he died, my grief banished almost all other emotions. My body was granting me time to process overwhelming despair. But I had always been empathic, feeling too much the discomfort or pain of others. Was I selfish now? Would I be one of those people who thinks their pain is worse than anybody else’s? Would I ever be the Eileen I had been before? Did I want to be?

I never returned to the person I was before. How could I? I’m different in all the ways that tragedy changes people. When Charles died, my inner and outer lives were edited — I lost some troubling emotions and I lost some friends. I was gradually blessed with new ones, but I carry a weight that the unbroken don’t — and I discovered I am exactly strong enough to carry it.

For 20 years I’ve made myself feel what I had to feel, learn what I had to learn, and I’ve tried to find beauty in each day. I’m still grieving because it will never end. He was my son.

We recently gave up fighting the dry, sandy conditions of his cemetery, pulled the plants that surrounded his gravestone and replaced them with tiny pebbles that we rake into waves. He was learning to surf and play the guitar and take great photographs in the years before he died. He didn’t have the chance to fully master anything, to lay his gifts before others and enrich their lives. That is one of the weights I carry.

My relationship with Charles didn’t end in 2003. We still talk — or at least I talk and imagine the insight and encouragement he freely gave. I ask him to watch over his siblings. He knows I still love him and I know he still loves me. His consciousness — the soul of what made him Charles — left his body and joined all the others who have left bodies behind. Like the Rainer Maria Rilke poem I adapted for his stone, “his song goes on . . . beautiful.”

He’s in a good place. And most of the time, so am I.

Eileen Trupia

Ronkonkoma