[ WP ] A parent explaining to their child that the other parent has died .

`` Fuck.'' I said, face burrowed in my hands. I could n't stand how he was looking at me. Why was he looking at me like that? He had to know. You do n't just hear your dad say `` Fuck'' while outside your mother's hospital room without knowing, but he asked anyway. 
 
 `` What's wrong Dad?'' Son of a bitch. No. I did n't mean that literally. Just how do you tell him? How would you tell your ten year old son that his mother's dead? Do you make something up? Do you treat it like when a goldfish dies and say he's gone off to a farm upstate? No, he'd never believe that. He's ten years old, too old to believe that stuff, and yet... too young to lose his mother. I looked at him, tears welling up, and in that moment he looked just like her. 
 
 All the memories came flooding back, the ferris wheel, her getting her hair stuck in cotton candy, a first kiss that came out of nowhere, and yet turned into everything. Turned into my son. In that moment, I wondered if I said the right thing, could she be okay? Of course not. Of course not. Of course not. 
 
 He must've seen those thoughts course through my head, because I could see his little eyes - her eyes, they were always her eyes - well up. God, I hated to seem him cry because when he cried, I could see her cry and it was awful. I held him in my arms. He was so weak, so small, yet full of infinite possibility, as all children are. That boy deserved a mother just as much as I deserved a wife. Yet, here we were. 
 
 `` She's gone,'' I whispered to him. I felt his little hands hold my back even tighter. I hated saying it. It was as if saying it had made it... real. I know I ca n't explain it, but who can explain it? Certainly not me. My son broke the hug and looked at me. 
 
 `` We'll be okay,'' he said, with her voice. 
 
 `` I know, son.'' I smiled at him. `` I know.''
