The profundity and clarity of that statement and your age at the time makes me think you were distanced from your true feelings. You were and are mature and incredibly intelligent. That person walked away because they could not empathize or even imagine your grief and sadness. I understand your lifelong grief because I lost my father when I was ten. I became the emotional parent of the family. When people asked me what my father did for a living, I would smile and then tell them he was dead. I cried initially but just smiled thereafter until 15 years later when I went to a Mahler 5th concert at Davies Concert Hall in San Francisco. The emotional roller coaster that is that music destabilized my repressed emotions. I weeped outside of the concert hall on Van Ness Boulevard for 30 minutes. I was a happy, confident boy before my father died. I understand you. I understand your clarity and maturity. I understand your jealousy too. I once yelled at my mother, who remained penniless pretty much the rest of her life because she was raising us after she had been waiting downstairs from my apartment and was robbed. I yelled like Bigger Thomas in Richard Wright’s Native Son because he couldn’t save her even though he was big and strong. I complained that she wasn’t like other mothers with jobs and lives. I felt responsible for her. I knew I was the reason she was poor. She was a single mom raising two children. I couldn’t even wrap my head around that. Anyway, she died of Alzheimer’s a few years ago. She was my best friend. You and I are like the rats in that experiment, where they hold them under water just before they die.