It’s quiet out here tonight.

My son arrived on a sweltering summer Wednesday nineteen years ago. July 13. Merely hearing or writing out that date feels like a complete sentence with verbs, subjects, and so many adjectives. In addition to marking the moment that my entire axis shifted, that date will have some relevancy a bit later in this story.

You may not believe this, but I will say this with objective certainty: my son was a really special kid. He was careful and gentle, and he was loved by a lot of people. For the most part, folks would not know that our boy had any medical issues. He ran. He played. He jumped. He was on a Little League baseball team called the Cubbies and he wore the number four. That number will be relevant later in the story, too. 

Owen’s health was complicated from day one. He endured a lot. At times it was really hard to watch him suffer. Some of those moments still haunt me. He was a trooper in the truest sense. He unexpectedly passed away in August 2014 due to complications that emerged after a series of heart surgeries. He was nine years old.

After he passed away, our family took a trip to a favorite South Carolina beach to spread some of his ashes. My son loved the feeling of sand escaping between his toes and boogie boarding at that particular beach. A lot of memories were made in those waves. So, it made sense to honor him there. We purchased what I can only describe as a biodegradable paper mâché turtle with dimensions roughly the size of an actual juvenile loggerhead turtle. A portion of his ashes were placed in a vessel within the turtle. It was actually quite elegant. While the bulk of our family traveled by airplane to the beach, my brother-in-law and I drove all the way from Pennsylvania to South Carolina with our family vacation supplies and the paper mâché turtle filled with Owen’s ashes by our side. I won’t bore you with the details, but I can share that it was a surreal and sad car ride. 

A few days into the trip we rented a pontoon boat and took the entire family way out into the water. This was the day that we would set the turtle free. Owen’s sibling and his cousins had plucked a number of beautiful pink flowers from a large bush nested against the garage of our rental house and brought them on the boat with us. The day was overcast and mild. For whatever reason, I captained the boat. It was a rather buoyant trip, as the kids loved the novelty of being on an actual boat. After about thirty or so minutes of tooling around the sound, we cut the motor. The abrupt yet welcome silence greeted the soft waves lapping against the hull in a subtle musical movement—a fitting soundtrack for this poignant and heartbreaking ritual. We released the turtle and the pinched flowers, and sunk into a very solemn moment—some of might say ceremony—honoring our boy. That experience is still etched vividly in my mind and will be—forever. 

A few months before this particular trip to the beach, we were gifted an opportunity to visit a nearby beach in South Georgia. The coastline in this area of the country is dotted with islands of various sizes and character. Extended family had invited us to stay at their sleepy and cozy beachfront townhouse at Christmas time. My first experience of beach at winter, this particular trip really allowed me, my wife, and our daughter to begin creating new memories. We built sandcastles in sweaters and collected the best shells across miles of damp and quiet sand littered with windswept reeds and our frigid toe impressions. Tortured and beautiful, the trip invited us to consider that new experiences could be made, despite the ever-present and profound sense of guilt—we were experiencing new things without our son. I have candid pictures from that trip on my bedside dresser. Patina and time do not obscure the bittersweet—not suprisingly.

Our hosts recommended three things for us to do while staying at their home: visit the neighborhood pizza shop, eat at the fantastic brunch and breakfast spot down the way (with the most gentle server named Jackie who still works there), and visit the Georgia Sea Turtle Center, which rehabilitates turtles that have been hit by cars and boat propellers, shocked by freezing water temperatures, or some other calamity. As you can imagine, the sea turtle rescue facility became even more symbolically important to us after we dispersed Owen’s ashes in that pontoon boat later that year. 

That beach has become an annual destination for us—a place to heal, to reflect, and to continue making memories. Each year we have visited the center to “adopt a turtle” that they are rehabilitating. Donations like ours help them pay for the medical and convalescing care that the turtles need. The first year we adopted Rufus, the next was Belle, and then other ones that I frankly cannot remember. 

As previously noted, July 13 of this year would have been my son’s 19th birthday. A few days before his birthday, we were at the South Georgia beach for our family vacation. We visited the sea turtle center. We spent a really good bit of time at the facility, taking pictures and looking through a lot of the exhibits they had on-hand. As we were finishing up, we decided to try to adopt a sea turtle. This year the center had a new opportunity, one where you could adopt an actual nest of loggerhead turtles. As folks may know, loggerhead mother turtles land on the beaches of Georgia, South Carolina, and Florida to lay their eggs—typically just above the high tide mark. The areas are monitored by sea turtle rescue facilities and volunteers, and the nests are catalogued, numbered, and typically cordoned off to prevent people from getting too close. We agreed that this option would be a great way to celebrate the memory of Owen near his birthday. And, so, we adopted a nest.

As I noted earlier, Owen’s little league number was four. And, that number has become both sentimental and symbolic over the past decade. His friends have honored his memory by wearing the number. The local high school baseball team retired it for a few years.  We have purchased plenty of sports memorabilia over the years exclusively because it included the number. Suffice it to say, four has figured large in our lives. So, it was a welcome surprise when we learned that the nest we were adopting was nest number #4. 

The adoption process allowed us, the adopting family, to receive periodic updates on the hatching. A week or so after returning home, we received an email from the sea turtle center. Nest #4, our adopted collection of darling baby loggerheads, hatched on July 13.  Happy Birthday, sweet boy.