My daughter was seven, and she had her grandfather’s chin, which she had never known to be her grandfather’s chin, and she stepped forward out of our little line and looked past Elke toward the coffin resting over the open ground, and she said, clearly, in the voice of a child who has not yet learned that some truths are supposed to be kept:

“He was our grandfather.”

I did not tell her to say it.

I want that on the record too.

I had not coached my children or rehearsed a scene; I had told them only that we were going to say goodbye to a good man who had loved them from far away, and Romy, being seven and honest, had simply corrected a woman who was telling a lie about her family.

That is the thing about raising children on the truth: you cannot then be surprised when they use it.