More than a year after my father died, my 6 year old son was inconsolably crying one night as my wife put him to bed. He hadn’t said anything about my father’s death until this night when he realized that it meant some day I would die. He was so sad at the thought and assumed I must be so sad about my father dying, that he was sad for me. I laid in bed with him talking about death and telling him how my father died—of COVID-19. It made my son think of vaccines. We spoke for an hour about how confronting death a little bit at a time throughout life—in stories or our own thoughts—is like a vaccine that helps us with the pain of losing our loved ones and eventually our own death. And for me, laying in bed crying with my six year old son about the death of his grandfather has been one of the best moments of my own life.