Maybe it’s a natural byproduct of the narrowing gap between myself and the big Four-O — which is, given present life expectancy, the age at which it becomes virtually impossible to deny that fully half of your life is actually over, and yes you did just hear my voice shake in terror as I said that — but I’ve been meditating on change and the passing of time quite a bit lately. Okay, more like brooding about it really. About how what we want and will about our lives and everything and everyone in it seems to bear so little actual weight in the end, each of us apparently having about as much real power over the grand narrative arc of space-time as a shadow has over the ground it falls upon. And while it’s true that I have enough sense to know that none of us should want to suppress the changes that bless and befall us — everything having as it does a season and a time and a purpose, turn turn turn — being as I am in possession of nothing but flawed human judgment and my own subjectivity, I of course still do. I still want to press my will into time, and have it leave an imprint there.

And so I’m brought to this photo I took a couple of years back of my daughter M with Mr. Moo, amiable pet of a neighborhood restaurant owner. Mr. Moo was a fixture along our hood’s Main Street, a tenderly anthropomorphised friend to all who crossed his path. Year after year, all spring and summer long, Moo would sunbathe on the steps of his owner’s restaurant, squinting demurely at passersby as if daring them to resist stroking his deliciously fluffy white belly. Few resisted. And M adored him.

I’m guessing that you know where this story is going.

Last summer we stopped seeing Mr. Moo around his usual haunts. M inquired after him endlessly — what had happened to him, where was he, did he move? — and though I knew the answers to her questions as surely as you do reading this now, I finally cornered Moo’s owner and asked her point blank what had happened to him. He’d died, of course. Of old age, and happily, if it matters. To me it didn’t.

The point is, I still haven’t told M about this. In fact, I’ve lied outright about it. As far as my daughter is concerned Mr. Moo now lives on a distant farm — yes yes, that ridiculous old cliche — and I’ve made his pastoral life sound so glorious and appealing that she often asks to visit him there. At which point my chest tightens, and I quickly change the subject.

But I don’t feel bad about the lie, about shielding her from confronting in a very concrete and personal way the sad reality that everything and everyone she cares about has an expiration date. An unknown expiration date, sure, but an expiration date nonetheless. No, I can’t bring myself to feel guilty for hiding from her the truth that — whether by some manner of estrangement or, ultimately, death — even the strongest attachments of the heart invariably end in grief, that every connection foreshadows separation, and that despite the certainty of this all her life she’ll pursue these fleeting bonds that will rend her with a doggedness insensible to reason, ceaselessly imploring this world, as we all do, to break her heart.