And, in a strange small-world coincidence, I went to college in Alfred, NY and in fact spent this past weekend with Alfred folks. Alfred is a truly lovely place in the summer, so I’m sure it was a serene, leafy place for her memorial.

O, cardamom, please accept my sympathies for such loss! Losing him, so very soon after losing your mother. I can’t imagine. After my mother died, the pain was so acute that I asked the dieties for a ten-year reprieve on loss, and for whatever reason (chance?) I got it. Thereafter it’s been a bumpy ride, but that ten years’ quiet was very, very much appreciated.

As to our kids: you know, it’s tough to tell how they’re dealing with it. The littlest, 2.5 yrs old, tracks some things but not others. He’s very sensitive to the feelings themselves, but more in a kind of magnetic/empathetic way. In other words when we’re upset, he sucks it up and then gets upset himself. The older one, the girlie, now 4.5 yrs old (she actually insists it’s noted at 4 & 2/3, since she knows that’s older than 4.5) gets very quiet and turns inward to herself, often reading or singing to herself elsewhere in the same room. She’s still there, but somewhere safer for her. I can’t tell you how poignant that is.

She knows Baba to be a person who has sadness in her, and she will from time to time simply come over and put her fingers at the edges of my mouth and push it upward. Which, amazingly, works.

My partner is very sensitive to our overexposing our kids to adult feelings, or adult vulnerability when it feels like they’re too young, mostly because of what she grew up with (suffice to say: lots of both, to her mind, way too much). So we probably err on the overcautious side. On the other hand (so many hands here we’re like an Indian god), on the other hand, I often bring into speech the several (now, seemingly many) important dead people in our lives. I want the kids to know that people not here physically are still here emotionally, or have left a lasting emotional presence in those of us who continue to love them and think about them. Both my kids can name their eldest cousin Erik in photos, can pick out which toys or which clothes were his, even though Erik died before our daughter was six months old. He knew her, is the point, and she knows that he knew her.

I can imagine the painfulness of feeling sorrow for these losses, and then seeing your daughter watchful for the signs of it, and redirecting whatever she would feel. What a very very hard place to be. I’ve got to hope that her own feelings are somewhere, and will find their path outward at her own pace and in her own way? One never knows. The day after my nephew Erik died, his younger brother Patrick (then eight) and Erik’s best friend Seth (then nine, my sister’s best friend’s son) were playing in the back yard. It was an elaborate role-play, where Patrick was a prince or something, and Seth was a dark knight, whose mission it was to protect Patrick from a constantly recurring threat of some sort. They played all day like this. Later when his mother asked Seth how he was feeling, he said something to the effect of, “Mom, when grownups feel sad, they get it out by crying and talking. Kids are different. We play it out.”