“Hi Alex- how is your head?”

Alex is a small nine year-old boy who likes to talk about his runny noses and his itchy ears. He looks at me through thick round glasses so that his stare is with gigantic fixed brown eyes. His eyes are moist, though, and I see shiny rails beneath them where tears have traveled.

“Oh, Alex- you are crying. What is wrong, son?”

Alex swabs snot with the palm of his left hand and blurts blandly, “My fish died.”

He stares at me with the earnestness of a postal worker.

“Alex, my young man, I am so sorry to hear this.”

His eyes fall and then, as if a switch was tripped, he roils into a loud bawl.

I feel sad for this emotional child- for his loss, and for his grand, vague continents of feelings within.

His small body convulses automatically to the gale that circles inside of him.

I reach over and put my hand on his shoulder, and let him cry.

Alex has days where he just cries. The sun is too bright. The traffic is too loud. The fridge hums too loud. The tree is bending too far. The phone rang. He cannot count his fingers correctly. His glasses are smudgy. His father is out of town.

“Alex, my lad.”

His body quivers before me on the couch in a little ball as his sadness shakes him.

“Alex, son- I am so sorry.”

He shakes and warbles and snorts and rocks and wails, and I watch him convulse, a mucus-machine, for a seemingly endless time, hand on his arm, his head, his shoulder. I am a god-on-high, powerless.

And all of the sudden, it is over.

Just like that, after the storm has blustered and blown for five minutes, it’s as if the clouds suddenly evaporated, gobbled by the emerging sun, or someone closed the water valves to his eyes, and he suddenly changes.

It is like the episode never happens.

“Uncle David- do fish go to heaven?”

He is still now, sitting upright and alert- a scientist, wrestling with the calculus of the afterlife for tiny sea creatures. His brain chops at the possibilities as his stare settles again upon my face.

“I think so, Alex. I think they would be very welcome there.”

“How do they get there if heaven is up there”- his right arm extends toward the ceiling and his little index finger points at the sky- “ and they can only swim?”

He stares, and I think.

“I believe their bodies change, and they can swim through the air into the stars.”

Alex looks at me critically, the rails under his eyes drying. He picks his nose as he cogitates.

“I hope so, Uncle David.” His eyes drop to focus on his knees.

“I will miss my fish, Uncle.”

I feel a wave of tenderness for his youthful simplicity.

“I will miss his eyes and the way he watched me when I was sleeping.”

Alex is a small boy with tiny thin arms, large eyes, a busy cranial cavity, and a tsunami of a heart.

“Would you like some ice cream, Alex?”

“Yes, Uncle David. I would like some strawberry ice cream in a mug like Granna likes to make it.”

“Granna knows best, Alex.”

“Yes- Granna always knows best, Uncle David. And maybe we can go find another fish.”