"Your father is dead," my mother said. Just like that. Then she held me as I sobbed in her breast, soaking her dress. She patted my hair like she did when I was a child and had broken a doll, or skinned an elbow on the sidewalk out front of our house. Playing tag with my brother and the children from next door.

She never cried. When I asked her about it she said, "I too am dead. The dead do not cry."

But a week later, when my brother was killed, I heard her screaming her grief in my dreams.