C.S. Lewis: I cannot talk to the children about her.

I cannot talk to the children about her. The moment I try, there appears on their faces neither grief, nor love, nor fear, nor pity, but the most fatal of all non-conductors, embarrassment. They look as if I were committing an indecency. They are longing for me to stop. I felt just the same after my own mother's death when my father mentioned her. I can't blame them. It's the way boys are.

   --C.S. Lewis in A Grief Observed (1961). The children were his wife's two boys, Douglas and David Gresham, whom he adopted in 1956. (They became heirs to the Narnia estate.) They were in their teens when their mother died.