World War II. The average age of a combat soldier was twenty-six. By Vietnam, the soldiers were younger. Many were barely out of high school, fighting communism before they were old enough to know much about the world they were fighting for.

Young men came home carrying things no one could see.

They called it shell shock in World War I. Combat fatigue in World War II. After Vietnam, psychology finally gave it another name: post-traumatic stress disorder. The trauma was real. Reliving it was real. It needed a framework. Vietnam helped give us permission to start talking about healing.

Healing and grieving.

For six years I’ve been processing the death of my son, Jude. He was thirteen when he died. Today he’d be nineteen.

Nineteen.

So I’m doing my best to smile, picturing what he’d be like now.

I’m guessing he’d be in college, studying art, music, or the culinary arts. Would he be a pastry chef? Or the next Gordon Ramsay? His singing needed work, but his songwriting, alongside his best friend Vincent, was unmatched for their age.

As a father, I watched everyone around me grieve this young man, my son. He was loved by so many. He was smart, witty, creatively talented, with a penchant for baking pineapple upside-down cake, his favorite.

But the Jude I knew will always be thirteen.

That’s one of the strange things about losing a child. The rest of us keep aging. They don’t.

I can picture nineteen because I knew thirteen. I can stretch the boy I knew forward six years and wonder what might have changed. Maybe he’d have grown his hair out. Maybe he’d have a girlfriend. Maybe he’d call home from college because he needed money, then stay on the phone another twenty minutes talking about something he’d written. Maybe he’d still bake pineapple upside-down cake.

I don’t know.

Grief leaves you with a person you knew and all the versions of them you never got to meet.

Today, I’m thinking about one of those versions.

Jude at nineteen.

Even not knowing, I can still smile. Because I believe Jude Thomas-Andrew Class is somewhere I can’t see him yet. Petting his dog, Oreo. Hanging out with Mere Bet and Papa Bob.