This morning my youngest daughter sat at the kitchen table and asked me if I remembered A.B., the kid from her little elementary school class. I thought, and said, sure. His mom was the artist.

Well, he is missing. He worked at NASA and a bunch of his co-workers went sailing on the James River Thursday night. One was dead, 8 managed to stay alive, and Tyler has yet to been found. She learned about all of this through her friends on Facebook.

My heart sunk. He was less than 25 years old, had been a world traveler attending college in Australia, hung out in Hawaii and built his own canoe in high school. He loved the water and the natural world, and apparently, space, too.

Mother earth took him back, swallowing him up.

My mind immediately went to the pain his mother must be feeling. There must be a hole in her heart. I said this out loud.

My daughter said, everyone will be missing him who knew him. I had to agree, but still, his mother carried him in her body, she nourished and cared for him, she watched him grow and move into adulthood. And now, he was gone.

My daughter made some reference to an apocalyptic novel that takes place under water which also has something to do with outer space and aliens. She lost me, but as I write this on the computer, real live astronauts are beeping in and talking about what they are doing. (She has a live feed from the space station on my computer.)

I have another friend whose son-in-law died recently from an asthma attack. He was about 30 years old and her daughter and he were trying to have a child together. This mother loved her son-in-law and was so supportive of their bi-racial marriage. This young family had been enveloped in loved, but it could not stop his death. Her daughter is now a widow.

Yesterday I was with both of my daughters at my grandson's 4th birthday party in a very noisy setting. There were no real conversations, just hand gestures and smiles, when we remembered to smile. His mother is leaving her marriage and my grandson will be primarily living with my son-in-law. They live several hours away from me and my biggest fear(I have several)is losing access to this precious little guy.

My grandson received a NASA baseball cap last year that was supposedly flown on a space shuttle. I wonder what his experience of family is, how he copes when all that he wants is his mommy.

I want the mothership to bring us all back together, in our best selves, whole, never taken from each other. I want time to not just stand still, but to be in those photographic, family-memoried places where even though we were anxious about the future, I could at least rest easier because at least we are all together.

That's what a mother does. We make sure the peeps are all together and accounted for. When one is missing, crazy terror arises until they are found. Our beating heats are frantic until we know where they are. Please God, know where they are. Every mother experiences this, whether it is the child who got lost in the mall or the kid who misses curfew or the teen who ran away.

This is not very useful imagery when your adult children are trying to figure out their own lives. Life is risky business. What's the matter with you, mom. Get over it.

Nobody ever tells us this when we make love, when we are so young ourselves and can't imagine our own aging, when we only know the potential of something more than ourselves as we hold these little bundles of joy or play with an energetic toddler.

Nobody ever told me. And, I wouldn't have been able to hear it. I thought that those sufferings belonged to the old people, because in the old days things were harder. Don't we have technology, an easier life? Aren't we forever youthful?

Lost innocence isn't reserved for youth. We get to know it more deeply in ways we could never imagine.