response to Permission by Christopher Merkner

The thoughts that surface to the top are about the dealing with the loss of a child and how that changes the perspective of how we look at the world. It is through a different lens something apart from dealing with death. The narrator of the story has to deal with life. And how the inability to let go and accept death is paramount to the story. It's a blending of both despair and confusion that grasp me to the story. Normally one would think of death as a final thought or as a clear cut from the real world but here the narrator brings back the dead son and the absent mother back into the conversation, back into the fold.
It appears to me that everyone in this world knows how to deal with the loss of a son. They know how to survive and it is the lack of surpassing from the father that is examined. To have a man fear the loss of more children, to have him unable to allow his children a moment truly to themselves to explore and to blossom in the real world.
The narrator has a haunting ghost of his dead son so ingrained into his system that he can't even lay a hand on his second son. Or look at his son without seeing his dead son next to him. He envisions a world where his wife and his deceased son talk about plans to move from their house into an apartment and see if moving locations into new destinations can help the family or a least the father move on from the thought of the death of his son.
The narrator doesn't speak, He doesn't make a sound because he is in this world almost dreading that a word will make it real. That reality would cement that his son is dead.