When I was tucking him into bed, he said, “I’m scared.” “I’m scared, too,” I said. My mind worked through what it needed to, returning to a passage in a book I’d read, about how to drill down to the nature of fear, rather than simply accepting. About how to narrow the defining of fear, as opposed to some general scary shit thing that would seem too big to live with. “What are you afraid of?” I asked. The question stopped my own tears. “Pain,” he said. That was still too big. But I’d learned not to open possibilities with my questions. I attempted to clarify, beginning with the most innocuous:
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