She asked whether she was coming tomorrow.
I said no, sweetheart, she’s not coming any more, not tomorrow and not any day, and that is going to be true forever and it is the saddest thing that has ever happened to us.
And she cried — not the way adults cry, in a huge, bewildered, physical way, the way small children cry when they are hurt — and she said, over and over, into my shirt, “But who’s going to be with me?”
Not where has she gone. Not why.
Who’s going to be with me.
That is the entire question a four-year-old has about death, and I have thought about it for years, and I have come to believe it is also the entire question everybody has and that we simply learn to dress it up.
I said: “I am.
I’m going to be with you.
You are never going to be alone in this world as long as I’m alive, and that is a promise, and I will keep it every single day.”
She was four.
She had no capacity to hold me to it.
I held myself to it for five years, most days, imperfectly, in the specific way a man in command of a battalion holds himself to anything.
