Bryan wanted to talk about death, and he decided I was the one to talk to. The first time he brought up the topic was the night before I left after a long visit. I’d been staying with his family for several nights, and when I hugged him goodnight, he started to cry.

“Bry,” I said, “I’ve known your mom for twenty years. I’m going to come back and visit you again. I am going to know you for a long, long time.”

“Yeah,” he said. “But you’re gonna die someday.”

I couldn’t exactly argue with that statement, but I stifled my laughter because it was clear to me that I had been given a great opportunity. I had a job to do: I was being invited to engage in a conversation with a child about death. I wanted to give Bryan what I never had as a child. I wanted to talk with him about death and not make it scary, nor sugarcoat it either.

Our conversation volleyed a bit. Yes, I admitted, I was going to die someday. We will all die someday. But I would probably live to be a very old man, I argued.  Like his grandparents, like my father. “Sometimes when people die,” he said, his eyelids getting heavy, “they come back and visit.”

After he fell asleep, I asked his mother, an old college friend, if they had recently discussed reincarnation. “No,” she said. “Someone else must have talked with him about that.”  I looked into her sky-blue irises and admired her beauty. I have had the pleasure of knowing and loving her since she was nineteen years old. I’ve watched her grow and age, watched her beautiful jawline and cheekbones emerge as her baby fat melted away. I could see the fine lines around her eyes now.

“I looked at a picture of me and Bryan the other day,” she admitted later, “and I could see the age in my face. And I thought, well, here we go. I’m aging. It’s really happening.”

A year later, I returned to visit, and in the glass bowl of a Pinkberry Yogurt shop, Bryan sparked up another conversation about death. “Is your mother still alive?” he asked. When I told him no, that she’d been gone a very long time, he said, “That’s sad.” His mango frozen yogurt with chocolate chip topping was beginning to melt, and he looked deep into my eyes, searching for something.

I tried to explain my struggle to make sense out of death, what I tell myself to make it easier. How I believe we still have a relationship with those who die, how we still talk to them sometimes, how they live on in our hearts. He listened carefully, but as I spoke, I realized he was the one who really knew more about this. He had said all I really knew about death: people die, and you feel sad.

At dinner that night, Bryan told me that he wished their dog, Blanco, hadn’t died. Blanco was a big, affectionate white Lab, a chunky guy with droopy eyes who was always looking for his next snack. He was very affectionate with me, and I loved Blanco. I was so sad the first time I came to visit after he had died; his absence was palpable in the house. I told Bryan that I think dogs go someplace special when they die, since they are so innocent, and then I felt an old twinge of shame because I don’t actually believe in Heaven, let alone Doggy Heaven. But that old Catholic rhetoric I was raised with came gushing out anyway.

I finally decided to admit that I didn’t have all the answers; in time, he would find those on his own. “Whatever you decide to believe will be right for you,” I said. “Everyone’s different.” He nodded thoughtfully, his dark blonde cowlick with the lighter tips bouncing like a cock’s comb. “Everyone gets to decide for him or herself where people go when they die,” I finally said.

“People and dogs,” he corrected me.

“That’s right,” I said, and we laughed.

That night after dinner, Bryan and I fed the clutch of chickens his family kept in their spacious backyard. The sun was starting to set, and the light all around us was a golden pink. The grain we fed them was yellow and cream with flecks of darker seeds. I poured the mixture of grains into my hand; Bryan scooped up handfuls of his own. Everything seemed to be saturated in color.

As we silently scattered the feed for the chickens, I wondered about the concept of past lives, and imagined for a moment that Bryan and I had known one another before.

I can’t say if I really believe in reincarnation, but I like the idea of it. I like the idea of seeing my old friend again in a new, healthy, young body. I liked imagining that when I did in fact die this time, I might meet my mother somewhere; she’d be young again, in kitten heels and a dress, walking a big white dog, both of them so very happy to see me.