Eight years ago as the family gathered after the sudden death of his father, five-year old Andrew Jr. asked, as though questioning the world itself, “How can a person just disappear?” I keep coming back to that moment and the clarity of his question. Things and animals and people appear and disappear routinely in a small child’s experience, but only in fairy tales and story books and cartoons. In real life a magician might try to fool you into thinking something could really disappear, as when he closes his fist on a coin and then he opens his hand and amazingly it’s not there---the coin isn’t merely somewhere else, it hasn’t simply relocated: the coin is Nowhere, there is no coin, it has disappeared. The reason his father is not at home is not that he is on a business trip, his father is no longer anywhere at all. How can that be? How can someone just disappear?
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