Birth and death: through a child's eyes.

When our daughter Hannah was not quite 3 years old, she participated in the birth of her younger sister, Leah, in our bedroom, the same room into which she had been born. She gently placed washcloths on my head, helped bring up the bassinet from the basement, spent time in the kitchen with her Aunt Julie baking a cake for the baby, and held Leah within minutes after she was born. When Hannah was almost 5 years old, she was present during the final days and the death of her grandfather, in the den, which became his room during his dying days. She put a washcloth on his head, helped to smooth his sheets, brought her crayons in and colored pictures sitting by his side, and touched his body after he died. Hannah is now 10 years old, and her reminiscences about these events are neither profound nor startling they are, in fact, entirely ordinary. She remembers the strawberries on the cake, and how Julie had to come upstairs and ask me where the flour was, in the middle of noisy, hard contractions. She remembers how she ran to get her favorite doll right after Leah came out, and how Doctor Fred pretended to tie off her doll's umbilical cord just as he had done Leah's. She saw the baby go directly into my arms for nursing at the breast. And she remembers how we were building our sukkah, the temporary shelter for the Jewish holiday of Sukkot, just outside the window of Grandpa Albert's room, and how pale and sleepy he was. She perhaps recalls that my dad, who hadn't been eating at the nursing home, eagerly polished off a bowl of my mother-in-Iaw's chicken soup with matzo balls on that Friday night we first brought him home, and how he roused from his drowsy state to join us in the Hebrew blessing over the challah to mark what