Grief has affected our family profoundly, and although, on the surface, we may seem like we’re moving on, or “doing OK,” I’m never very far from being reminded that that is not at all the case.

A few weeks ago, I was out to dinner with a friend. I had no sooner got done discussing how well-adjusted G has been with the whole graduation/college in the fall thing, when the phone rang. It was G. There was that dreaded pause between me saying, “hello,” and his response. I knew it was bad news.

Unfortunately, as foxes tend to do, one had found our ducks, and our little laundry room chicken. While we had them locked down securely during the night, during the day, and while we were outside puttering, we did allow them to roam freely. We weren’t expecting a predator in the middle of a sunny afternoon, and well, now we were stuck with the consequences.

I rushed home immediately and found G, inconsolable, tearing through the brush, looking for a trace of the remaining ducks. He was devastated, especially since he’d been home during the event, and hadn’t heard a kerfuffle until it was too late.

I hated to see him blaming himself. These things happen. Depending on how hungry the fox was, or if she had a den of kits to feed, she was going to do fox things. Our plan was good, but not good enough.

What was the most painful was that I knew that his grief didn’t just extend to the lost ducks and chicken. G, more so than any of my kids, knows how nature works, and has been raising animals long enough to know that this was a possible outcome.

I tried to console him with the idea that our little chicken should have been dispatched months ago, when she was first attacked, and we had given her many more months of a very pampered life.

This, in fact, made it worse, because he said she was a fighter, and he had let her down. At that point, I decided to stop talking.

All was not lost, though. I discovered two eggs that our girls had left us that day, carefully gave them to G and told him to pop them in the incubator quickly.

Shortly after that, I found him rummaging through the egg basket I’d collected and brought into the house. He rounded up every duck egg he thought might be viable and added them all to the incubator. Three eggs didn’t fit.

Shortly after that, I got an alert that someone had ordered a larger incubator, overnighted.

Now came the most difficult part. Twenty-eight days. Twenty-eight days of trying to reconcile the loss of our ducks with the hope that small pieces of them would live on.

Every Thursday, G candled them, and every Thursday, I held my breath. The first week was good news. They all showed some growth. I suspected that G was not candling them properly, because 100% growth is highly unusual. We had a long way to go.

The second week passed, and the only update I got was “they look good.” He was slightly subdued, so I suspected maybe some had taken a turn, but he wasn’t ready to deal with that yet. We came to the final candle before the hatch.

“I have some really good bad news for you, Mom,” he said. They were all thriving.

So, duck math had us lose three and gain 12. “Mom, you should really be there when they hatch so they imprint on you, because I’ll be gone for the next four years.”

Yeah, that was some “really good bad news” for me, since I had just gotten our spring delivery of female ducks moved out of the house, and G was away on a long-planned trip when they started to hatch.

Herein lies the rub of grief: We never would have brought these 12, delightful, fluffy, yellow balls of joy into the world without the devastating loss of our CJ, Sammy and Leo. Chances are, we never even would have gone down the duck road to begin with if Steve were still here.

I never, in my right mind, would have allowed him to fill up the incubator, but I was grasping at any straw to try to stem the tidal wave of grief he was experiencing.

Grief makes us do crazy things, and I suspect every decision we make down the road will continue to be affected by it. While I will never justify any loss with the godawful “everything happens for a reason,” I will try to find reasons to keep on going. Twelve new ones just got added to the list.

Liz Pinkey’s column appears on Saturdays in the Times News