This was my son Elijah’s last Halloween, in 2016. He died six months later from the DIPG tumor slowly squeezing his brain off. I think about him every day, and extra on days like today. He’d be eleven and a half, and I miss him more than I can imagine. 
My daughter Genevieve is now nearly as old as her brother- three years older than her - was when he died. It is a strange and terrifying thing to go through life like this, always imagining a child always nine years old but now ten, now eleven and a half, next year twelve.
Losing a child is like this. You spend every day, every life event imagining a son or daughter who will never grow older than the day they died. And so you spend the rest of you life living in parallel worlds - the world in which your child died, and one where he is still here.
