Desmond left for college that fall and never came home again.
Gerald opened the backpack fully now, revealing a stack of envelopes bound together with a rubber band gone brittle with age, each one addressed in careful handwriting to a Desmond Cole at an address in a different city.
"He wrote to him," I said, running my thumb across the top envelope. "Why didn't he ever send these?"
"He sent the first four," Gerald said. "Desmond returned all four unopened, over the course of about three years. After that, Bennett kept writing anyway. Just never mailed another one. Said it felt better to write toward something than to write toward nothing at all, even if nothing ever came back."
It felt better to write toward something than to write toward nothing at all.
I want to be honest about how completely my understanding of Bennett shifted, sitting in that room with twenty years of unsent letters spread across my lap. I'd spent three weeks believing I was sitting with a lonely man who simply had nobody left. What I actually had been sitting with, the entire time, was a man who'd built an entire structure of quiet, disciplined grief around a son he loved and had never stopped losing, every single day, for two decades.
