Grief, Unspeakable Grief

The death of Jesse, age 30, has filled my waking and sleeping hours since I have returned. This young man, as his father wrote to me, "lived as long as he could, and then he couldn't."  As a child and friend to my own son, we knew his troubled, intelligent soul early. We rejoiced when his life took shape with relationships and work that had meaning for him.
Here is what I know in my priesthood. There are no words of comfort here for his parents. There is nothing, right now, to be said. I imagine that the only way to see out of this all-consuming grief is to know that there are so many parents who have lost children. I look at these people with awe. They are actually living in this world, buying groceries, going to jobs, telling jokes.
I believe in the "peace that passes understanding."  I believe that Jesse soul is in repose, and, as we say in our Prayers of the People, I believe that "light perpetual shines upon him." I know that his parents, my friends, are inconsolable.
We who have young sons speak of Jesse, then become silent, because we know only too well that he could be our son--that he is our son. I speak to my friend Mary in the need to tell someone--to make real this fact that I'm living with--Jesse's death. I explain to her that I've known him since he was about 8, the circumstances of his death as I understand them, how I know his parents. Then we become very quiet; we have each folded in upon ourselves. We each think of our own sons, sip coffee, and then one of us says, "What a beautiful fall day." Or, "Would you like a slice of pumpkin bread?"
We can tell stories that we know:
My cat Miranda belonged to Jesse at one time--when he was a teenager, he along with a group of his friends, found her and began to raise her as a kitten. When his parents said that Jesse could not bring a new cat into a household that already had one, his mother, remembering the death of our cat Smokey, asked me if I would take her. "Yes," I said. And when she arrived, she was the very image of our tortoise shell, Smokey. But she jumped on tables, on the stove, on kitchen counters, always grazing for food, knowing no boundaries.  We liked to say that Miranda was raised by teenage boys.
Jesse never really forgave me for taking Miranda, but I'm deeply grateful to him for finding her.