Recently, I took my boys on a walk again. All three of them, Gabriel on my back, Noah and Jacob walking along with me. Once again, too, we walked in our own extended neighborhood to a nearby park. As we were meandering back from the park towards our home, we decided to take a different route through a small nature preserve. In order to get into the preserve from where we were, we had to walk along a high chain-link fence and then crawl through some very low underbrush before we would reach the back entrance to the preserve. Jacob was in front of me, Noah behind me. Gabriel, still on my back. When we got to the underbrush part I had to almost lie flat on my stomach to prevent him from being hurt by some of the branches. Suddenly, Jacob recoiled. Just outside of the underbrush sat a large wooden box:

"There is someone lying in that box" he cried.

I came out of the underbrush at that moment. He was right. Two large feet, clad in huge black boots were sticking out of the box. Twitching. The person was not dead.

"Don't look into the box, I said, let's just keep walking. Over there is the entrance to the park."

So, we kept on walking and, except for a few words about the fact that this probably was a homeless man, didn't talk more about the incident.

It wasn't until several days later that I had a "day"-mare; since I don't have night-mares, never have--I can't decide what would be worse: sleeping comfortably and being hit by a nasty vision of something that could/could have happened or go through the motions and routines of a regular day and suddenly being violently stopped by my own thoughts. What happened? Well, whatever triggered my body to go there, I was remembering the part where we crawled through the underbrush, my body low, with the additional weight of Gabriel on my back. I could not have straightened up at that moment, had to wait until I came out into the clearing, were the box was. I physically felt this sensation of being pressed down, of not being able to stand straight. Then the thought came:

"What if this person in the box had grabbed Jacob, who was only a few steps in front of me? What if he had harmed him?"

I was so close, and yet, because of my position, so far from helping him. Violent thoughts and images (images I will spare you) of him being harmed rushed into my mind and it seemed as if the branches and vines through which I was crawling had laid themselves not only around my body but also around my heart.

"Too late, too weak, too late," these were the words that kept floating up.

I tend to think that these kinds of thoughts--they're coming more and more often now--are part of my ever growing awareness of my ever decreasing power to protect my children from the dysfunctions of the world. I feel powerless when images of a state leader being led to the gallows flood the news. A leader, moreover, who was once heralded a friend of the US. I feel powerless when my children ask how it is that someone dies when he is hanged. I feel desperately powerless when my son, in his usual style, is trying to think of ways that he could avoid the unavoidable:

"I could hold on to the rope."

"I could spread my legs really far, so I won't fall through the trap-door in the floor."

I feel powerless because I know that he already has absorbed the fear of that person at the gallows whose picture he saw somewhere. Now it is his fear. Oh, how I wish I could stop his train of thought.

"Not you my love," I want to say. "That guy deserved it," I want to say, "you won't ever deserve something like that."

But I don't believe in the logic of deserving. I am teaching my children that nobody deserves to be killed, not even a murderer. But that belief makes the world a messy place. A place where right and wrong are connected rather than neatly separated. It becomes a place where the unimaginable can happen: A good person, a little eight year old boy even, could be attacked and killed, by a grown man, while the boy's father looks on helplessly.

I know not to be true what he still most fiercely believes:

That I, his father, could protect him from all harm.

I know that not even my thoughts about this issue are clear-cut enough to protect him. I cannot offer him a philosophy of life that is simple and easily applied to all life-situations. I so wish I did have that to offer. Instead, I only have me to offer. The warmth of my hugs for him, my smiles of encouragement, the song I sing for him every night. Though this also is what makes it hard to think of them as old men. It's not their age, but the fact that I will not be there anymore to protect them with my love.

This, it seems, is the only viable alternative to falling into deep desperation: to protect them, yes, to immunize them, with love. I am not sure it works, to be honest. But I will not stop doing it.