The Last Enemy

An eight-year-old boy wrote an essay in school entitled, “What a Mom means to a kid”:

A mother is a person who takes care of her kids and gets their meals, and if she’s not there when you get home from school, you wouldn’t know how to get your dinner and you wouldn’t feel like eating anyhow.

Nine years later, the author’s mom walked into her son’s empty room with that essay, which she had saved, clutched tightly in her hand-and she cried. She cried because her only son had gone away to college. It was an important time in the boy’s life. But he and his mother had been very close, and she was feeling the pain of separation very deeply. The mother had visited the college campus earlier and had seen the new world that would be her son’s, but not hers. It was a “kind of dying,” she said later. But, after those first tears had been shed, she discovered…