My name is Dana Pierce.
I’m thirty-seven years old, and Caleb is my son.
His father left when Caleb was four, so for most of his life it had been the two of us.
Caleb discovered football when he was six.
He found an old, slightly deflated football at a garage sale for three dollars and brought it home like he had discovered treasure.
“Mom, can I keep it?”
“Of course.”
Then he asked,
“Do you know how to throw?”
“A little.”
“Can you teach me?”
I taught him what I knew.
It wasn’t much.
Everything else he learned from videos, coaches, and thousands of hours spent practicing.
He threw passes in our backyard.
Ran routes around trees.
Practiced footwork until the grass was worn thin.
By eight, he was playing on a youth team.
By ten, his coaches were beginning to talk about him differently.
They saw potential.
Caleb noticed it too, even though he pretended not to.
Football became his thing.
His favorite professional team played in a stadium about forty minutes from our house.
His favorite player was a wide receiver who had grown up in a small Alabama town and worked his way into the league.
Caleb saved birthday money and money from mowing lawns until he could afford that player’s jersey.
He wore it every Sunday.
Then, one afternoon in October, everything changed.
Caleb was walking home from school.
He was only two blocks from our house.
A five-year-old boy was playing outside near the corner when his ball rolled into the street.
The little boy ran after it.
At the same moment, a pickup truck was approaching.
The driver didn’t see the child.
Caleb did.
He ran into the street and shoved the little boy back toward the sidewalk.
The truck hit Caleb instead.
Thirty miles per hour.
The driver hadn’t been drinking.
He wasn’t looking at his phone.
It was simply one of those horrible moments where several things happen too quickly for anyone to undo them.
Caleb’s surgery lasted six hours.
I spent every minute of those six hours in the waiting room wearing the clothes I had worn to work that morning.
When the surgeon finally came out, I knew from his face that my life was about to be divided into before and after.
There was damage to Caleb’s spinal cord.
They had done everything they could.
But nobody could promise that he would walk again.
When Caleb woke up, I held his hand.
His voice was weak.
“Mom?”
“I’m here.”
“Is the little boy okay?”
I almost cried.
“Yes. He’s okay.”
