Sometimes Kathy Carlsen sees headlights flash through a window at home and sweep the interior space like they did when her son James would pull his car into the driveway at night.

Her heart jumps and she thinks maybe, for an instant, her son is alive and coming home. She has even checked his room, her heart racing, hoping.

“And it is dark and quiet,” she says.

The hardest part of her day is night, her sleep wracked by quietness; a stark reminder her son is gone, lost to a heroin overdose at 19 years old.

When he was alive, she would hear him in his room at night playing his guitar — the guitar she bought at the Guitar Center, a Christmas present for him in 2013.

For three-and-a-half years, the Taylor 110 acoustic dreadnought was an extension of himself. He took it everywhere.

So when his mom noticed it missing — and he confided to her with anguish that he had sold it to buy heroin — it was sadly disappointing and upsetting.

But nothing compared to the morning of June 29, when the mother found her son dead in his bedroom chair.

Peace has eluded her ever since. Recently, she wondered if she could find the guitar, her son’s Taylor, and buy it from the person who bought it from the music store.

A person at the Guitar Center told her it was against company policy to reveal who had purchased the instrument.

Carlsen told the story about her hope to find James’ guitar to The North Andover, Massachusetts Eagle-Tribune and its sister newspaper, The Andover, Massachusetts Townsman. Maybe someone who knew where it was would read it and help her find the instrument. 

“When you lose somebody and you don’t have their voice anymore, and you don’t have them to touch anymore, it’s, the guitar is the closest thing I’d have to that because it was something he held all the time, and it was his voice,” she said.

A reader on a mission

Heather McQueen of Methuen, Massachusetts read Kathy Carlsen’s story in the Sunday Eagle-Tribune, March 20, and she vowed to herself to do what she could to reunite Kathy Carlsen with her son’s guitar.

She posted the story and her writings about the guitar on her Facebook page, where it drew thousands of readers.

She got in touch with a friend from a Guitar Center. To her delight he was able to locate the name of the person who bought the guitar and ask him if he was willing to sell the guitar to Kathy Carlsen.

The man who bought the guitar is Tom L’Abbe, a truck driver from Peabody, Massachusetts, who plays and collects guitars.

McQueen’s friend called L’Abbe and confirmed that he had bought a Taylor guitar from Guitar Center and then told L’Abbe about Kathy Carlsen’s wish.

L’Abbe agreed right then to sell it back for whatever he paid for it, and told the man that the mother could call him so they could make arrangements for her to buy it.

Carlsen called him and a few days later, on Saturday March 26, the pair met up at L’Abbe’s home.

“When I walked in and looked at the kitchen table there was his guitar case, lying on the table … and (James’) name and phone number was showing,” she said.

She knew the minute she saw it and started crying.

“It was like seeing an old friend,” she said. 

At the kitchen table

A week later Kathy Carlsen returned with the guitar to the L’Abbe home, a gathering of all the people who had a role in reuniting her with her son’s guitar.

They sat around the big brown kitchen table, she and Tom L’Abbe and Heather McQueen. 

Carlsen hugged the guitar case, with the guitar inside it. She rested her head in the curved space above the guitar body.

Kathy Carlsen said that last week when she returned home from the L’Abbe’s with her son’s guitar, it was the first time in nine months that she slept more than 90 minutes without waking to jarring silence.

She said having the guitar has given her the first peace she has had in the last nine months.

She keeps the guitar next to her bed.

He is gone but the musical strings that connected them remain.

Date writes for The North Andover, Massachusetts Eagle-Tribune.