Dear Lily June,

Right now, the world seems to be a very dark place indeed. If you look at just the largest acts of terror and murder in the Westernized world lately–the Pulse nightclub shooting of 49 members of the LGBT community in Orlando, Florida; the seemingly race-driven killings of individuals in the Black community by police officers and the seemingly retaliatory killings of police officers in Dallas, Texas and Baton Rouge, Louisiana; the driving of a truck into a crowd of innocents in Nice, France that resulted in the deaths of at least 84–you might find yourself, like your mother, largely overwhelmed. And this is nothing compared to the bloodshed and tension that has been unfolding in places throughout the Middle East for centuries.

I sat on our balcony yesterday with your father and asked him, in a pit of depression and despair, what right we had to bring you into a world…