The thought of death is something most people are forced to face sooner than they are ready for. If fate is especially cruel, it will place that burden in your hands before you even understand what it means to lose someone forever—before you can grasp the shape of absence, the silence where laughter used to be.

It had been cruel to you. Too cruel. The memory is carved into your bones: the doorbell shrill in the quiet evening, two officers standing in the porch light, caps pulled low against the rain. Their words didn’t land at first, not in any way that made sense. They broke across your chest like glass shattering, and when they finally sank in, your knees had given way beneath you. From that moment on, life had been split in two—the before, when Johnny’s voice still filled the walls of your home, and the after, when the world became nothing but shards you could never piece back together.

But it wasn’t only your world that collapsed that day. Johnny’s death had stolen something from your son too. The last time Johnny saw him, he had been a rosy-cheeked boy, clumsy with toy soldiers and crayons, too small to understand the weight of the rucksack his father carried out the door. He never saw him become the gap-toothed child who beamed proudly into the camera on his first day of school. Never heard the questions that tumbled from him each night—questions about the man whose smile looked back at him from photographs, the man he whispered goodnight to before closing his eyes.

Five years. That was how long it had been since your life had been reduced to absence. Five years of answering those blue-eyed questions as best as you could, carrying your grief quietly so your son could carry his childhood. Five years of watching Johnny’s face appear again in every tilt of your boy’s chin, every lopsided grin.

And then came the day he came home from school, shoulders bent beneath his backpack, clutching an envelope in one hand and a balloon string in the other. The balloon was blue—the exact storm-lit shade of his father’s eyes. He held it carefully, reverently, as though it might burst if he breathed too hard.

“They had us write letters today,” he said, pressing the envelope to his chest. His voice wavered, but he stood straighter, as if bracing himself against the weight of words he wasn’t sure he could carry. “To someone we miss. Then we tie them to a balloon. So they can find them.”

When you knelt to smooth his hair, he unfolded the little note inside the envelope and read aloud in a whisper, his accent tripping over the words but steady with meaning:

“Hello Papa… have you finally arrived? I hope that with us, your pain left too. Oh, I miss you endlessly— Not just your laughter, but even the fights. And if I could, I’d come to you Riding a blue balloon.”

His eyes shone wet as he tied the letter to the ribbon. Together you walked into the garden, your hand firm on his shoulder. The balloon trembled in the wind, caught between earth and sky. With a breath that was part prayer, part surrender, he let go.

You both watched as it rose, a single spot of color drifting into the vast blue above, carrying words to a place beyond reach, a realm no mortal could touch. You lifted your son into your arms, holding him close as his gaze followed it, lips moving in a silent farewell.

Neither of you saw the figure who had stepped quietly into the lawn behind you. A man, shoulders broad beneath a uniform that still smelled of smoke and dust, boots worn from too many miles. His chest rose and fell unevenly, as though breath itself was too heavy to bear. And his eyes—those storm-blue eyes, the very shade of the balloon vanishing into the heavens—were blurred with tears.