That our son had taken to crafting ceremonial death masks was a source of mild consternation. He was eight and still slept on vinyl sheets.
   
The masks were cast in cheap plaster and displayed above his dresser. An orange cat he'd found in an alleyway. The class gerbil. A crow on the back porch. Some evenings my wife and I peered through his bedroom door: our son, his legs tucked under his body, absorbed in a kind of ecstatic trance.

And what did we do to contribute to this obsession? Was it the dead composers he was played in the womb? No parent wants their child fixated on mortality. They want them captivated by life, the living, the extant and animate; for the cold breath of death never to ruffle a single hair on his or her head. That a parent passes long before a child is a clemency, time at its most magnanimous.
   
I watched my son on the playground. He and another boy had spurned the apparatus to fill their pockets with stones: stones that had existed long before us and would exist long after. He approached me, slowed by the added weight, and placed his hand against my face. You forgot to shave this morning, he said, and I knew that he was right, that in fact I hadn't shaved in several days. His hands were ashen from handling the rocks. The other boy called from across the playground. He stepped back and emptied his bloated pockets, and then followed his friend up the ladder, emboldened by his newfound lightness.