Beginning to Say Goodbye: A Two-Year-Old Confronts the Death of His Father

This paper focuses primarily on a little boy's premature confrontation with the unexpected and untimely death of his father. However, in the background stands the death of another father—this one anticipated because of age and illness. In chronological time these two fathers died within days of each other but, in the psychological time that marks the emotional development of children and families, the deaths were widely separated. Benjamin was only 27 months old when his father died; I had reached middle age at the time of my father's death.

I was introduced to Benjamin through a phone call placed during the week I was out of town to attend memorial services for my father. Periodically, throughout that week—when time stretched too slowly, or when I felt the need to connect to the everyday life my father's death had interrupted, or when I wanted distance from the intensity and complexity of intergenerational family dynamics—I would check the messages on my answering machine, finding the disembodied voices oddly comforting. As I stood in my mother's kitchen, surrounded by the sounds and feelings of mourning, and listened to the voice of a colleague asking if I had time to see a 2-year-old whose father had died without warning, I felt an unusually intense pang of sadness and empathy.

I am not ordinarily so vulnerable to magical thinking but, in this instance, I felt as if the coincidence of the shared loss of our fathers bound me to this little boy in some important, almost mystical way. From the beginning, even before I knew many of the details of this child's life, I was