She was not there. When her son needed help most, Rovelyn Baterbonia was hundreds of kilometers away.

Davao — Aurora. An impossible distance.

Parents who lose a child torture themselves with that thought. Should I have called? Stopped him? Should I have been there?

The police say a strong current carried Rene Baterbonia and fellow Ateneo player Divine Adili into deeper water during a team-building activity. They say there was no foul play. That it was an accident.

Parents hear those words differently. The mind becomes a prison. The sentence is life.

Rovelyn cannot ask Rene what happened. Think about that. The only person who knew exactly what he saw, felt, and what frightened him. What he thought.

Instead, she is learning about her son’s last day from reporters. Police officers. Investigators. Government officials. On Facebook.

For 19 years, she was the world’s leading expert on Rene Baterbonia.

That feels wrong.

Rene once told a coach he would not return to Davao for five years. He’d make money. Help his family. Build a life.

Five years. His mother was not ready for five days. About Rene not coming home after a long life. He was not an old man. He was not sick. He had just arrived.

Just arrived.

Weeks earlier, he was playing in the Palarong Pambansa finals. He had earned a place at Ateneo. He was preparing for the UAAP.

His mother thought she had sent him to school. School. Not to war. A disaster zone. Not the ocean.

Her son was a basketball player. Not a swimmer. A mother trying to force the world back into a shape she recognizes. It won’t cooperate.

At one point, through tears, Rovelyn asked. Why was he in the sea? Why were there bruises on his body?

People can make peace with endings. Endings are part of the deal. We understand endings.

What we struggle with are stolen beginnings. The hardest funeral is often the one held for a person nobody got to meet.

There comes a point when parents stop carrying their children. Stop holding their hands. Then a point when they stop knowing where they are every hour of the day.

The distance arrives gradually. A child dies only once. A parent can lose that child thousands of times. In dreams. In memories. On birthdays. In meals cooked for fewer people. In ordinary afternoons that arrive without them.

The tragedy of a child’s death is not only the years that were lost.

It is the years that remain. For the parents.

A week earlier, Rene was standing in front of his future. Today, everyone is standing in front of his past. The DoJ. The lawmakers. The NBI. Task Force Rene.

Most tragedies offer victims somebody to hate. Already, strangers were attaching things to her son’s body that the police said were never there.

The police have denied rumors that weights were attached to the victims. That this was how her son was supposed to have died.

That is not the same thing as telling a mother why.