I’m 79 now, and that first deep REM sleep after his deployment... Christ, the stillness was deafening. Like the world itself had stopped breathing in tandem with my own ragged gasps. The doctors called it acute stress reaction, but I called it blissful oblivion. And I felt the prickle of shame then, a tiny, hot shard, because it had been my *son*. My boy, finally quiet, finally not coughing through another asthma attack, and all I could taste was the quiet... and a grotesque sort of relief. The dark humor of it all. Still makes me chuckle, a little — that grotesque relief, I mean.