At camp, an older girl tells her ghost stories.

Days later she recounts these to me, wide-eyed and in hushed tones typically reserved for the sharing of deep, dark secrets. But it’s like that in a way, I suppose. These dark things, these dark things that go bump in the night, are pieces of her dawning comprehension of the truth of mortality. Of death, the deepest and darkest of all secrets.

Driving home from the grocery store she unexpectedly bursts into tears. “I want you to stay with me forever and ever and never leave me,” she sobs. “Mommy, I don’t want you to die.”

How can I comfort her? I tell her I’m going to be around for a long, long time. But it means nothing. That I will die, that I must die, that this will happen regardless of how much she loves me, that is what matters to her.

I can’t deny it, though every part of me wants to spare her pain. “Death is a part of life,” I say. I’m trying to find something true to say that she could find solace in, but I can’t. Death is death. It terrifies me, too.

She asks to sleep with me almost every night now, and though my heart’s sore and aching I put her off. I’m afraid of setting a dangerous precedent, one I’ll have to wrestle with at bedtime for weeks to come, one that in the end will only serve to deepen her insecurity and fear. I have to think this way. I have to do the right things for her. The things that will be right in the long run, in her future life, for her future self, however unpleasant and difficult now.

I’ve begun to understand that real parenting — the hard stuff, the stuff that hurts you more than it hurts them, the stuff that’s for their own good whether they like it or not — is comprised almost entirely of denial. It is a gigantic stone wall of refusal generated by a distant and murky future that like oracular mediums we’re forever straining to see into, sniffing the ether to catch a whiff of impending disaster and despair that must be averted at all costs. That’s my job. It’s every parent’s job, in a way. To erase terrible mistakes that have yet to be made. To conjure every possible nightmare and battle all of them into extinction. To make a monster from clay that holds your child’s name under its tongue like a terrible promise, so that you may inscribe death on its forehead.