While my dad was away, I slept on an air mattress on my mom’s floor. The bed in my room remained made without being undone for six months, a white comforter with small pink and blue heart shaped flowers, decorative throw pillows, and a single Beanie Baby leanings against those pillows never being disturbed.

The Beanie Baby was a mint green rabbit with a bowtie that had somehow come to represent my dad to me. It had proportions more similar to an adult than most Beanie Babies, of which I had dozens, and which were stored in a plastic tub that turned into multiple plastic tubs as my paternal grandmother gifted me more and more of the little plush toys each time she saw me.

Everyone processed the situation with different strategies.

I don’t know if my dad told me to select a Beanie Baby that I could use to remind me of him and I chose that one, or if it was gifted to me by him. Either way, it seems like something a child psychologist would advise someone to do in our situation.

I also have a feeling my brother, Michael, had a Beanie Baby rabbit to represent my dad too, but he wouldn’t have kept his on his bed, but on his desk with a handful of other things that were always there. He may have even had the green one while I had a light lilac one. The memory is foggy.

I do remember that when my dad was very close to leaving, he quickly touched the top of the mint green or light lilac Beanie Baby to his lips and then gave it back to me, and I put it where it remained for six months, sitting on my bed. We then went to the kitchen and while he stood against the flowered wall paper (the same wall where when I was little he would pick me up with a single hand and hold me high against the wall so I could feel like I was climbing), and he said a final goodbye to us before he went outside and got in the back of a van.

I can’t remember feeling sad as a child, only happy most of the time, and anxious sometimes, like when I didn’t know where my mom was. I can remember walking to my room and looking at my Beanie Baby after my dad left, and also looking at it while he was gone and thinking of him, which I think was just a form of sadness that I didn’t have a name for, and still don’t really.

Small objects they can call their own seem to be oddly reassuring to children.