In a meeting we discussed that chronic challenge of interviewing job candidates: What do you ask that can help you identify someone who would be good to work with? Someone suggested the "What is your biggest weakness" question. But we decided that people prepare an answer for that one. Besides, the weakness isn't the answer you want to know. Everyone has weaknesses, the important thing is how people work with their weakness to do a good job. Someone said, what we should ask then is "What is your greatest fear?" Because it's fear that motivates you in life. I, for one, fear what kind of answers this question might generate. We aren't a clinic, after all. Nevertheless, one of us tried it in an interview and the interviewee had a good, safe answer. Score one for that candidate.

Later, one of my coworkers directed the question to me, off thread. He stated a greatest fear, something trivial—popping balloons. And then asked me mine, in an attempt to draw me into a lighthearted exchange I suppose. I didn't reply.

I fear most a gruesome death, something excruciating and mutilating like the one my mother endured. And yes, this is one of my primary motivators.

The summer after my mother died I had nightmares about war. In the dreams, I watched Cold War–era missiles plunge toward me and I was helpless to move or to evade them. I'd watch them speed closer and closer with the fear growing until I began to accept that I would die. Then I'd wake up.

That next school year, when I was in sixth grade, the elementary school received a set of small illustrated books on WWII. Each book covered a single campaign. The books did not convey the complexities of the war, of course, but they did not shy away from the horror. From them I learned about and saw pictures of survivors of the holocaust and the naked bodies piled up of the people who did not survive it. I read about the brutal battles in the Pacific and the shark attacks that obliterated populations of sailors who survived ship sinkings. Of course, D-Day, the atomic bomb, too—all that. I read and reread them.

Today if I'm reading nonfiction there is a good chance it is related to war in the 20th century. I don't quite understand the persistent interest in the subject, but it is not morbid. The history centers me. It's like the destruction casts into contrast the perfection of existence in the first place, and from that clarity I can reach deeply into that aquifer of loss. We all have that source, but sometimes I feel alone in having tapped it. I think these stories keep me in the company of others who I know know it too. And when I'm at that wellspring, living seems its richest.

For the past two weeks I've been glued to Ken Burns's The War. I was worried that it would be jingoistic and that I would become angry with a perpetuation of U.S. propaganda about WWII. But I haven't found that to be the case. The documentary is patriotic, but that is not a bad thing and the series doesn't omit facts of American injustice toward Americans or others, even if it does keep the number of such mentions low. The aim seems to be to tell the stories of some people who lived through the war, to memorialize these stories so that current and future generations can hear the stories as if by first-hand account, observing the emotion of the individual who is describing what they experienced. By offering this proxy oral telling, some popular myths about the survivors of the war may be exposed. This is important, even if it eventually proves not to make a difference in whether we choose diplomacy or violence the next time we are faced with conflict.

On the way home from the hike this past weekend Tom told me that he finally understood what my mother had meant that last time I saw her when she told me she was sorry. I appreciated that he remembered and that he had told me of his epiphany. But it was also strange for me to think that it took being a parent for him to be able to understand. I don't recall ever having not understood it; I understood it when she said it. And now, when I remember it the grief that swells is all confused: Is the sorrow for me or for her? What an impossible thing to know that you will die and leave your daughter without the promise of a parent. I can't imagine how she tolerated it.

Maybe it is all these things—the documentary, the talk about fear, talking to Tom—but the old grief is close to the surface again.

There's a picture of me that was my mother's picture of me that she kept next to her bed. In the picture, I'm brand-new and the camera has caught a moment of joy. Behind the glass of the frame is a small clipping of my hair that my mother put there. All the time she was alive I looked at this photo, and then the photo got put away. A few years ago I found it again. I saw myself as she saw me and burst into tears. I put it on my desk and observed with astonishment how quickly a simple glance at it could summon a violent grief. Eventually, I could look at it and cry or not cry or simply feel a tenderness. The picture had become a kind of barometer of how I was doing with all this living. The other night I looked at it again and the pain rushed hot and full to my cheeks. Andrew was here and I told him what it was about: It was the sadness of knowing that the one person who wanted me the most, who would want to remember everything about me, was gone; that, in fact, there is no one alive besides me to remember fondly and to recall for me all the little things of my life. I told him that I understand this to be our common fate, really, but that knowledge doesn't obviate the loss. Usually we are older when we realize this truth, and, of course, a parent doesn't have to be dead to be uninterested or even hostile to the existence of a child. But most people I know have some connection to, can take some solace in the endurance of, their living history in the trust of a parent, and it gives them foundation.