The story that opens this essay was so heartbreaking! My kids are usually okay with death, but dead parents are a whole different thing.
Here’s the first few paragraphs:
My two-year-old’s face was blank. Then it curved down into the slightest of frowns, as he stared at the open magazine’s page. As he’s usually a very expressive kid, I had never seen this look before.
But then, I had never read a line in a story quite like that: “This baby skunk lost its mother.”