Missing Bryce --6 months down

It has been six months since Bryce woke me up in the night and told me he had just gotten an email from BYU saying he had been accepted. BYU had started on Monday and it was now Tues. He was all signed up for UVU and the next morning when he came up was insistent that he go ahead and attend the classes he was enrolled in just for that day. I couldn't figure out why he didn't want to go straight to BYU and get started until later when I realized that he had made arrangements with friends to meet them at UVU and he said to me that morning that he just wanted to go to his classes! So he came up Wednesday morning just in time for family prayer wearing his favorite red jacket from DI that was really a girl's jacket from a club in England. He ran out the door after prayer only to return to give me a hug and his dad a fisted high five. He drove off in the RAV4 that we had just gotten the week before, nervous to start his first day of college. I have reflected often on that morning with the light coming in from the dining room window as we knelt down in a circle. I am grateful that the last remembrances of Bryce are kneeling together in prayer and for my morning hug good bye. I had an 18 year old friend of Bryce's in Africa write me that Bryce would tell how I would wake Bryce up each morning when he was home before his mission for family prayer. Bryce began the tradition of a "stair prayer" as we began to call it because Bryce never made it all the way past the stairs to come up for morning prayers. He would park at the top of the stairs hoping for a few more minutes of shut eye while everyone else gathered near him. I am grateful that when the family was younger, I insisted that they never leave the house without giving their mom a hug good bye. I know Bryce is in a better place but he has sure left a hole in our family, especially at prayer time and in my heart. Love you Bryce.