The Things They Still Carry

I thought this, from the young man who lives in my shed, was very well done for the amount of restraint.

Do read Zack Peterson: RIVERVIEW

Christopher Marquis is not quite 6.

He loves lizards and letters and flashcards and trains. To strangers, he offers garden stakes, which he pretends are hot dogs.

He graduates from kindergarten this week, and one day his mother thinks he'll become an engineer or a physics professor.

But his father will never see it.

Army Spc. Christophe J. Marquis died Sept. 4, 2010, from injuries he sustained during a suicide bombing in Afghanistan, days before his son's second birthday.

Father and son, one letter apart but a thousand worlds away.

"I wish now that I actually would have named him after his father," said Brittany Jackson-Marquis, Christophe's widow.

To this day the pain never stops, but Jackson-Marquis, 26, finds the questions to be the hardest part.

They stem from mundane things like movies. When they watched Frozen together, Christopher was intrigued by a sinking ship.

Did the passengers die like my papa?