Labyrinth

My son Dustin unexpectedly died in March 2018, but we didn’t know the cause of death for almost seven months. After a long history of mental illness and addiction, Dee had been in active recovery for four years and was trying to come off methadone. It might have been suicide. It might have been a relapse, an accidental overdose. When we finally received the medical examiner’s report, we learned that he died, in fact, of pneumonia.

In those excruciating months, when I was still in shock and living breath by breath, minute by minute, a friend put a journal and a pen in my hand. At first, the pen was a sword. I slashed and stabbed the page. I raged on it. I wrote in a trance. I wrote from dreams, wrote not remembering what I wrote. I wrote drunk. I wrote because I needed to climb out and over the edge of the black hellhole of despair. I wrote to regather the shattered pieces of my...