My children are young, and I am responsible for remembering their lives – from the elaborate baby books to the time my three-year old, now six, identified the contents of a ground beef package at the grocery store as meat noodles.

If I don’t record these moments, these milestones, they will dissipate like dandelion spores. There will never be another source for this information. Nobody will ever know these dandelions like I do. Google baby book guilt – it’s a whole thing, this feeling that their childhoods are slipping away unrecorded, this fear that I will, as a parent, be someday held to account over my handling of these details. When did I first wave? my third-born adult child will demand, sadness and accusation in his eyes. How big was my head?

There are apps that will text me specific questions about my children, recording the answers for posterity so that even if I forget, even when I’m too busy, the archiving process will continue. What is [Child A’s] favourite bedtime story? Does [Child B] collect anything? These companies will turn my answers into books and keepsakes if I pay them enough, but what I use instead are large, grey Rubbermaid totes, stacked in a tower in the basement and filled with the material fragments of my children’s lives, from NICU wires and hospital bracelets to locks of hair, post-its with scrawled measurements from doctor’s appointments, daycare crafts, gifts, awards, handprints. If these fragments can someday become offerings then I might, in the end, be found worthy.

What will our children remember about this time? Home for weeks or months, cut off from friends and grandparents, suddenly barred from the beach but allowed on the iPad. Will they remember the cracks in us – our sadness, our fear? What will we remember for them, and what will we forget?

Look for the helpers, we have learned to say, invoking Fred Rogers’s famous words to divert children’s attention away from the horrors on the news and back to goodness and security. There are helpers in every tragedy, we know, so focus on them. But the people who were killed in Nova Scotia last week were the helpers – the nurses, the front line workers leaving their families behind to nurture strangers, the teachers. Ordinary people doing their best, doing what was right or going about their lives. These were our good neighbours, looking out for each other, keeping others safe, risking their own lives, running toward the burning buildings, stopping because they were asked, stopping to help.

Gathered at the end of our driveway last night, we lit candles and sat on the ground. I told my son, 22 people died in Nova Scotia last week, and the people in Nova Scotia want us to be sad with them tonight.

What were their names? he wanted to know.

Tom, my mom said.

Heidi, I said, but that was all, because I couldn’t remember the others.

There is a concrete slab in our back yard where, two years ago, just after it had been poured, we wrote our kids’ names with sticks. Likely thinking of that, he asked if we could pour new concrete and write the names of the people who died so that we can remember and not forget.