A Mother’s Heart

A mother grapples with the permanent loss of her son, Denzil, as he enters the Novitiate. She fears he’s becoming a stranger.

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Susan had always been good at reading the silences between words, especially Thomas’s. She’d thought that asking him to help with the packing might ease the weight of what lay ahead – those difficult days that would test them both. But his sharp, clipped answers told her everything she needed to know. It was better to let him be.

She had always been the practical one, the one who faced hard truths without flinching. Yet neither of them had ever imagined sending their eldest away for so long. The Novitiate – even the word felt heavy on her tongue.

Thomas, in his quiet way, had made peace with it. “We’re giving him to God,” he would say, as if repetition might make the sacrifice feel less like loss. “Surely we must love God more than our own children.” The words sounded right, biblical even, but Susan wondered if Thomas truly believed them, or if he was simply trying to convince himself.

Wattala wasn’t far – an hour by train, perhaps less by bus. But distance, Susan knew, wasn’t always measured in miles. Once Denzil entered that world of prayers and studies, of bells and silence, he would begin to belong somewhere else. She had seen it happen before.

Hadn’t it happened to her? She could never return to her childhood home in Eldeniya, not really. The girl who had run barefoot through those fields was gone, replaced by someone else entirely.

Even now, she could see the change beginning in Denzil. Just moving to grade five had made him more serious, more distant. He spent long hours alone, reading or simply staring out of the window. When she tried to talk to him, really talk to him, she found herself addressing a stranger wearing her son’s face.

What would the Novitiate do to him? Would they take away his laugh, his mischievous grin, his way of humming old film songs while doing his homework? Would they teach him to walk softly, speak softly, until even his presence in a room became whisper-quiet?

Standing there with his half-packed suitcase, Susan felt the first real stab of fear. Not fear for his safety – the Brothers would take good care of him – but fear that she was losing him already, that the boy who still climbed into her bed during thunderstorms was already slipping away, becoming someone she might never fully know again.