What do you say to a child at times like this?

I was watching some video the other day that I shot for my son's first birthday party. The 9/11 attacks had occurred about a week earlier. The video shows everyone having birthday fun, but the mood is quite obviously subdued. I was glad he was too young for me to have to explain what had happened and how the attacks had emotionally wounded everyone around him.

I didn't have to explain much about the terrorist attacks to him in those early years, but a few years later I read him "The Man Who Walked Between the Towers," the wonderful Caldecott-Medal-winning book by Mordicai Gerstein. There's a line in his book near the end that reads simply, "Now the towers are gone." That line probably prompts every young child to ask "Why?" just as mine did. It was easier to explain three years removed from what happened, but still difficult to put into words why someone would attack us. The book was a peaceful way of bringing up a topic that I knew someday he would have to know about.

I wish that had been the only act of large-scale violence I had to explain, but then there was the massacre at Va. Tech. Ironically, it happened about a week before my daughter's first birthday. What a sad coincidence. As with my son in 2001, I can put off for a few years having to explain that to her, but what of my son? How do you explain the senseless? When you can't answer "Why?" for yourself, how can you answer it for a child?