Our school year has officially started and I am the mom of a senior. No two ways about it, I was going to be an emotional mess come this day even if Steve were still here with us. This is one of those milestone moments that at one point in time, we never thought we’d see. Or, if we did see it, it might not look as typical as we had expected it to look. It certainly doesn’t look the way I expected it to, but for different reasons.

We’ve been fortunate enough that A’s congenital heart defect is something that’s been able to be back-burnered for most of his life. Following his initial round of surgeries and follow-up visits, we’ve settled into a routine of annual checkups, and biannual check-ins. This is one of those milestones that I’m overwhelmingly relieved feels almost normal compared to what I expected 17 years ago.

I’d imagined Steve and I waving to him as he drove down the driveway on his last first day of school, and both of us fighting back tears until he was gone and breaking down. Steve had been working a night shift on A’s first day of kindergarten and I made him rush home that morning so we could see him off together. At the time, he was attending Our Lady of the Angels in Lansford, and he went to school on a van driven by Mrs. Helen.

A was so eager to start school, as well as ride on the van all by himself. Although he’d been going to preschool at the same place for two years, I had dropped him off and picked him up daily. Putting him on the van and watching him drive away was a different ballgame. One of my favorite pictures from that day is Steve holding an infant E, who is waving goodbye to her big brother. She didn’t love that I dragged her out of bed a little early so that she could wave goodbye to him again, and she certainly doesn’t remember doing it when she was a toddler, but I did.

While A will normally be chauffeuring his siblings to school, the first day of school is “Senior Sunrise,” a relatively new tradition where the seniors gather in the stadium on the first day of school to watch the sunrise. On the last day of school, they will gather again to watch the sunset. I think it’s a lovely way to start the year and end it. As A laid out his clothes for the first day and packed all of his bags for his assorted practices and rehearsals after school, I was reminded of his enthusiasm way back on that first day of kindergarten. I also found myself fighting back tears, albeit for different reasons that I did way back then.

It breaks my heart that Steve is not here to see this and celebrate it. A has worked so hard over the last few years, despite all the bumps in the road, and he is well-poised to have, as he would say, “an epic year.” Steve was always there for him, a constant source of support. Although they were at that stage in the father-son relationship where sons like to test their fathers and fathers like to remind their sons who the boss is, there was never any question that Steve loved him completely and thoroughly. I am lucky that A was mature enough at the time of Steve’s death to know that and understand that. Then again, Steve loved being a father more than anything else in the world, so, it wasn’t hard to know that or understand that, even for his headstrong, teenage son.

A has been very conscientious about preparing various write-ups for senior recognitions, to be sure that he mentions Steve as much as he can. I know it’s his way of keeping his father there for him. For my part, I know Steve would have relished every minute of watching A enjoy his achievements and resting on his laurels for just a bit. I can just picture him bursting with pride the way he did so many times over the course of the kids’ lives. I worry sometimes that the kids will tend to remember him being tough on them when he knew they could do better, or when he held them to higher expectations, but I just have to pull out pictures of him at the end of championship wrestling matches, or when they went hunting together and the boys managed to snag a trophy, or when he sent them off on the school van, knowing that they were going to do great things, to remind them of how incredible he thought they were.

This week also saw my very last middle school orientation with E. She was on a tight schedule and had only a few moments to get home and change for the night after her cross country practice. As she got back in the car, I saw evidence of tears on her cheeks, and as we pulled out of the driveway, more tears started flowing. It didn’t take me long to figure out what was bothering her. Back to school nights were always a chance for Steve to be Steve.

He would turn into the world’s worst middle school student, regaling the kids with made-up-adventures of crazy things he pretended to have done when he was in junior high, or encouraging them to indulge in bad behavior that none of our straight-laced, rule-following kids would ever imagine doing, and he would needle me, the nerd with my pen and my notebook so I could take notes as I met with all of the teachers. He would make up ridiculous supply lists and pretend not to have paid attention to the classes he was sent to observe. I realized along the way, he managed to calm the kids’ jitters in ways that I couldn’t. I really could have used his help that night, because it was obvious that E had a lot of them.

We got through the night, mostly by trying to think of the craziest things he would have said if he were here, and we might have even managed a few laughs along the way. I guess that’s how we’re going to get through this year, by continuing to try to find little ways to remember him and incorporate him into all the things that he should be here to see and enjoy. It’s not the way it should be, but at least we are starting to be able to remember the good parts and laugh about them a little more than we cry.Liz Pinkey is a contributing columnist who appears weekly in the Times News.