Something about this feels so final…

like I’m walking straight into the last thing I’ll ever get to do for you. Not leaving you behind, I could never do that.

There isn’t a version of this world where you aren’t still carried inside me, in every breath, every step, every quiet moment that aches a little too loud.

But I am taking you back to the place that held pieces of you long before I knew how much they would matter.....Uwharrie those trails, that red dirt, the climb to the top of Daniel. That’s where you found something the rest of the world couldn’t give you.....Peace.....Freedom. A place where your mind could finally slow down and just be. And somehow… that’s where you were always meant to return.

I keep telling myself I’m not leaving anything behind.

It’s just a shirt… just fabric… just something that once wrapped around you.

But it feels like more than that. It feels like I’m setting a piece of you loose into the wind, letting it drift through the trees, catch on branches, settle into the dirt you loved so much. Letting nature carry what my heart refuses to let go of. Maybe it won’t haunt me the same way after this.

Or maybe it always will… just in a different form.

This feels like the last goodbye and I don’t know if I’m ready for that.

Because as long as there was something left to do, something unfinished, something I could still give you… it meant I wasn’t completely out of ways to hold on.

But this… this was your last wish. And I’m going to carry you up that mountain, step by step, just like I carried you through so many things in your life. I’ll feel every rock under my feet, every breath in my chest,

every memory hitting me all at once as the view opens up at the top. I’ll stand there where we stood before where laughter echoed, where engines roared, Where Hank played loudly and where life felt big and wide and full of promise. And I’ll remember you in every version of yourself that existed in that place… the boy, the man, the pieces of you the world didn’t always understand. And then I’ll say goodbye. not the kind people hear, not the kind anyone else would recognize. The kind only a mother knows how to say. The kind that breaks something open and stitches it back together all at once.

       I’m taking you home…

not just to where you loved to be,

but to where your story began, where your roots run deep in the dirt and the trails and the memories we built over a lifetime that wasn’t nearly long enough. And I’ll leave that shirt there. to move with the wind,

to sit in the quiet, to belong to the place that always felt like yours. And somehow, I’ll walk back down that mountain feeling like I am without you in my arms… but still carrying you in every part of me.

Until one day… I find my way back to the top of Daniel and we sit there together again. .....