My grandmother Esther died on Nov. 17 at the age of 95. Grandma had five children: Charles, Patricia, Michael, David, and Valerie. Tragically, she buried four of her five children as adults — one of whom was murdered, along with that adult child’s 14-year-old daughter. The only one of her children to outlive her is my mother, Patricia. Over the years I have felt sad for my grandmother and her profound losses, but I don’t think I ever fully comprehended the depth of her grief until now.

I glimpsed the enormity of what she suffered — just the smallest glimpse of one corner of how her soul must have screamed when each one of her babies died while she was left to view their bodies that came from her — when my own child had anaphylaxis to her first taste of bread at 10 months old.

My daughter is 19 now, but I can instantly transport back to the moment when I realized she might be dying. I saw her red, blotchy face, streaked with tears squeezing through swollen eyes, cries of panic pouring from her swollen lips, and my own heart literally stopped beating. I felt the sensation of being in an elevator that was hurtling down to the ground floor from the top floor, and recognized the inevitable crash ahead.

I snatched my child up and my mind whirled rapidly through decisions. Call 911? No, we live too far — she doesn’t have that much time — the reaction has already been going on for 15 minutes. Get the keys, grab the wrapper for the bread to show the doctor. Grab my wallet. I was planning for all the ways I needed to ensure that this baby, my baby, survived. I had no other thoughts save the singular imperative that my child not die.

What I did not do is make any plan for the very present possibility that she might die. I did not think about how I would feel.

Since then, however, I have often had dreams where she or my other child die. I feel the air sucked out of my lungs. I feel myself falling to the floor. I hear myself screaming and clutching the air that does not move into her lungs. I feel the bathroom floor, cold beneath me as I lie for hours with no will to do anything except grieve.

I wake up from these nightmares with my throat raw and as shaken as if it really happened. But it did not. My children are young adults now, but I still try to memorize their faces, the moment they airily say goodbye as they walk out the door away from me. I try to commit their voices to my memory against the omnipresent terror that lives, like a muted shroud draped over my heart, that they may die.

How did my grandmother survive the actual deaths of her children? Each and every time one of her babies took their last breath, how did she manage to inhale and exhale, and eventually buy celery and eat a sandwich? How did she manage to put on socks, butter a piece of toast? Laugh? Ever again? My friend Kirsten died five months ago and some days I can’t breathe because her absence sits like an albatross at the back of my throat. I did not birth her, though.

Genocides happen every day, and sometimes whole families are slaughtered except for a few survivors. They dig through crushed houses with torn and bloody hands, desperate to reach their baby, while terror at what they might find squeezes their throat tight like a fist. They pull their child from wreckage and clutch their limp and bloodied body to their chest, willing them to breathe, to live. Or perhaps they stand over their baby’s bloated and obliterated face after they are fished out of a river where someone threw them away like garbage because they didn’t like the color of their skin, and see with horror the stamp of terror on that face that transfers to their own soul forever.

Somehow they lay them down, their baby — flesh of their flesh — to never be in their arms again.

When a child is murdered, a parent experiences the sort of cellular grief that constricts your entire body and relentlessly and permanently throttles the oxygen from your access. My grandparents experienced this parental scream that never, ever allowed them to inhale. Their hearts were locked in a perpetual first scream of disbelief and anguish. Yet they had to go to the store for celery, they had to rake their leaves. They had to somehow eat a sandwich.

How do we as witnesses to horror do that at the same time, every day, and not hear the collective agonizing shrieks of the hearts of grieving mothers throughout time all the way to this very day, screaming as they lay their babies’ broken bodies down forever? How do we then eat a sandwich?

Tolley M. Jones lives in Easthampton. She can be reached at columnist@gazettenet.com.