When I told my then-five-and-a-half-year-old daughter that her grandmother had died, she laughed at me. “No she didn’t!” she exclaimed, scandalized by my lie, and then scampered off to finish her movie in the living room. I remember feeling completely unmoored: by the shock of my mother-in-law’s sudden, wholly unexpected death, by my grief and my husband’s, probably by the ocean of pregnancy hormones in which I was, at 32 weeks, awash, and most of all in that moment by my complete and total ignorance of how to handle this situation. I thought that I had to make my daughter understand, right now, in real time, that her grandma was gone: it felt urgent, immediate, even though of course, the thing had happened, we had the rest of our lives to live with it. It was just such an overwhelming experience, the first time I’d lost someone that important to me, so of course I had no idea what I was doing. But as anyone who’s ever guided a small child through grief knows, there’s breaking the news, and then there’s helping them understand. The first thing, you do once. The second thing, you do until.

I’ve been thinking a lot about that experience since ICE murdered another innocent person trying to live his life and provide for his family. In every one of these horrible stories of parents torn from their children or people gunned down in the street, there is some gut-wrenching detail that stands out to me, something I can’t let go of. What I keep coming back to in this case is the video of this young man’s partner talking about what a wonderful father he was, how besotted he was with his little girl. I listen to her speak, and all I can think about is the grueling process that lies ahead for her, not just of grieving her own loss, but of helping a three-year-old through hers. You cannot imagine, if you’ve never done it, how impossibly difficult it is to answer your child’s questions about why the person they love can’t come back: how exhausting, how frustrating, how much it can make you want to stop the car or walk out of the room or hide underneath your covers, just so you don’t have to say the words one more time. Just so you don’t have to keep seeing their faces, hearing the pain in their voices, as you break their hearts for the thousandth time with this relentless, unalterable reality. It feels like it goes on forever, and that is what lies ahead for this young mother who has lost so much. This is her work now: another kind of mothering for which nothing can prepare you.

For Karolina

You might think that the moment when

a pajamaed girl with a pink backpack sees

her world explode in a cacophonous spray of (blood)

bullets and a rain of shattered (bone)

glass would be enough to make that girl understand

that the father she loves is gone. 

But you would be wrong.

The work of teaching a child that death is forever

is grueling, and difficult, and tedious.

It is labor

that you must perform every day, over and over again,

finding answers to the same innocent, 

impossible

questions of Where? and When? and Why?

even when your body feels as lifeless as his was, lying in that street,

and your throat wants to close around the syllables like teargas.

And maybe it was some

jacked-up wife-beating PTSD motherfucker

who shot your beloved on a Monday 

morning on his way to work,

but it is you who will have to explain it to his Gordita,

over and over again, every day, trying to make sense of the senseless:

with empty excuses like gone, and forever, and I don’t know. 

It is your words that will fall like hammers, breaking

the tiny bones of her small fingers, 

doing the work of deconstruction that razes

“before” to make space for “after.”

And it makes you a kind of accomplice

in her father’s murder:

not the one who pulled the trigger,

but the one who refuses to bring him back, 

the one who keeps telling her never, and always, 

the one who keeps saying it—

dead he is dead he cannot come back he can never come back—

despite her tears

and her pleas. All that labor

just to build something nobody

anywhere

wants.

The chamber of the heart that can contain immeasurable loss

does not develop on its own, like an eyelash

or a hand.

It requires an absence to form around.

Then it permineralizes, slowly;

accretes over time

like a fossil.

This is what you’ll mean when you tell her

Your papa will always be in your heart:

that he will be the stone at her center,

and the emptiness inside it

will be shaped 

like him.