This weekend was to be the weekend that Craig would have made his holy communion. He would have been wearing a beautiful little suit perhaps and would have no doubt looked so charming among all his friends and classmates as they shared this special day together. We would have gone off for a meal afterwards and spent a wonderful memorable day together. The day would have been captured on film for all eternity and those photographs would have been the fodder of future nostalgia as I and his Mum would come to look back through old photo albums and remember those times together.

But all that’s gone. I drove out through our housing estate and could see cars parked everywhere: families and friends all coming together for this special day in their children’s life. I drove out of the estate and up to the empty graveyard where Craig is buried. I stood at his grave and looked down upon the single red rose and card that lay in front of his picture. ‘Just one flower and one card’ I said to Craig. There should be so much more. I spoke with him for a while and in my mind compared what I was doing with my son in that moment, to what another father was doing in one of those houses I passed in my estate. Here I stood, at the foot of my son’s grave, saying ‘Happy Communion’ while the world, it seemed, moved joyfully on for others.

I’m not a religious man, but that’s not the point. It’s certainly not about the significance of ‘communion’ in the religious sense. That’s not why I stood in the cold and felt so lonesome and so sad for my son. The Oxford dictionary defines communion as ‘the sharing or exchanging of intimate thoughts and feelings’. That is the communion I yearn for; that is the communion that I so desperately miss - the communion between Craig and I. I survive now only on memories and look to the past to feel Craig in the now.

But while I may not believe in religion, I certainly do believe in Craig. And while I do look to the past to feel closer to Craig now, I also know that Craig IS in the NOW. I know that Craig lives on in some as of yet unknown way to me and that the communion I once shared with Craig can and will be had again.