I will never be able to think about my Mikey without tears.

My mother’s phone call this evening with her Good News was that she has to travel back to the small town where this happened. It’s where I graduated from High School, and until the Incident, I always loved it there. I can’t stand being there, now. My mother lives 9 hours away from there, but she is going to be there on the 22nd of May this year.

The students of the graduating class of 2011 REQUIRED the administration to leave a chair in the seating area for the graduates vacant. They REQUIRED that some of their class money be used to pay for a hotel for my mother for the night before and the night of Graduation. They REQUIRED that there be a part of the ceremony where the class officers present my mother with Mikey’s cap, gown, and diploma.

This is the one area that I seriously regret my loss of faith in religion. The absolute certainty that religious folks have that they can use to assuage the despair, that those who die will be, “waiting for them,” in whatever afterlife they believe. It seems to be a really enviable comfort to think that they’re not gone forever, just for now.

It would be nice.

I can’t even go to see the ceremony, myself. There are too many people in that town that would make it about how much they hate me and what I stand for (let alone what I am, as well) instead of about how much everyone in the entire town loved my Mikey.