And I will always be the mother of Hersh Goldberg-Polin.

Hersh will always be my eldest child.

Hersh will always be my only son.

And Hersh will always be 23-years-old.

As one of the millions of parents around the world who have tragically and chokingly buried a child, I am stuck in time. I always will be.

Oct. 7 is approaching. That date upon which my son, Hersh, was stolen from a music festival advertised as being for peace, love, and unity. Hersh was held hostage for 328 sickening, agonizing, and starving days until his captors executed him with five other young and luminous people in a tunnel underneath Gaza. 

His majestic body, that I carried in my body many moons ago, was returned to me in a bag, skeletal, bearing signs of torture, filthy, missing his left forearm that had been blown off during his abduction, and with six bullet wounds. I awake every day to the confusion of this truth. I am glued to time's flypaper of stickiness. I cannot move.

People care about us and want my family and me to improve—emotionally, psychologically, mentally, spiritually, and otherwise. They desperately want us to get... better. I am told this is similar to the way people who lost loved ones on 9/11 encounter well-meaning comforters, in the quarter century since they lost someone core to their identity, in this layered and puzzling place called life.

I remember waking up on Sept. 11, 2001, in our house in Berkeley, California. My husband Jon was already in the shower. It was around 6:30 in the morning, and I could hear baby Hersh, just 11 months old, cooing in his crib in the room adjacent to mine. The clock radio (remember those?) was on. In my fuzzy moments of waking, I shot up in bed when I heard the announcer say something about an airplane flying into the World Trade Center in New York.

I ran into the bathroom and said to Jon in the shower, “Hurry up and come quickly, something terrible is happening in New York.” Everyone in the United States has their tale of........

© Time