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I'd always heard that love lost could drive a woman crazy. Push her plum over the edge until she was in a free fall that landed her slap dab in the middle of crazy.
But I never believed it until it happened to her.
All I had never fathomed could possibly be true I came to believe as strongly as I believe in a sun that rises and rivers that run to the sea.
He loved her. That much we all knew.
You could see it in his eyes, even when she exasperated him beyond words. He'd simply shake his head and roll his eyes.
She complained mildly that he spent too much time with the boys and not enough with her. And that part was mostly true because there was always a good time that beckoned and a beautiful girl that called.
But he always came back to her.
Every night, he walked in, asking "What's for supper?"
She often recalled how she loved him the first time she saw him. "I never seen a cuter anything in my life," she'd remembered wistfully.
Though he wasn't always exclusively hers - over the years, she had to share him with a bevy of beauties - he was always there when she needed him. He washed her car, cut the grass and there were even the times that he would spend a full day shopping with her. For that's how much he loved her.
The night he left, no one knew he wasn't coming back. She later recounted time and time again how normal the evening had been. She'd made fried chicken, biscuits and gravy and mashed potatoes.
"If only I'd knowed," she moaned quietly, each day edging closer to losing her mind after it all ended like it did. He kissed on the cheek and rushed out into the night.
No one ever got all the details but this much we know: The sheriff, a cousin of hers, knocked on her door around midnight. Disheveled, she opened the door, clutching her robe together with one hand. He pulled back the screen door and that's when she screamed with a pained anguish he said he'd never forget. She didn't care to know the details of the wreck. She knew all she needed to know.
She didn't go crazy over night but it came pretty quickly.
Within months, her mind slipped away and, like him, never returned. She went shopping in her bath robe and slept in her Sunday clothes. Once she even spray-painted her grass yellow because she liked yellow better than green.
Crazy, that's what she was.
But they say that's how every mother feels who buries a son.
Ronda Rich is a best-selling Southern author. Sign up for her newsletter at www.rondarich.com.