The astonishing thing was how quickly it happened.

We were spending the weekend in the country, unfamiliar territory for my 2 1 /2-year-old son Wesley. It was late Sunday morning, and we were lingering over our breakfast of banana pancakes and turkey sausage, thinking of what we might do when the guests arrived later that afternoon. Wes, who was correctly and repeatedly identifying the dining room table, was ebullient, which is his normal state, save the occasional temper tantrum.

Abruptly, he stood – always a no-no at meals – pressed against the backrest, tipped the rickety chair, and fell to the floor with a thud. I swore loudly and Wes screamed with a klaxon wail that I had never heard from him before. His mother, in the next room, flew to his side, and we could see he was bleeding heavily from the mouth. In a few seconds, we realized to our shock that Wes had lost his two front teeth.

My wife cradled the wailing boy while asking me to fetch cotton balls to stanch the bleeding. Her shoulder was soaked in his blood. Her calm was impressive.

This was one situation I hadn’t envisioned. A broken bone or gash requires fairly straightforward treatment and a trip to the emergency room. But missing teeth? I quickly found one of them on the floor – it was obviously the whole tooth and not a fragment. Tiny and perfect, like an infant.

We were lucky to have as neighbors an experienced mother and her daughter, an EMT. They came over and helped us look for the other tooth. They advised us to put the tooth we’d found in milk (the standard way of keeping it alive in case it could be reinserted). There wasn’t much else they could do. My son’s crying soon diminished. “These things are often harder on the parents than on the kid,” the EMT said. I turned away and began to weep.

Phone conversations with a hospital emergency room, a local dentist, and our pediatrician convinced us that there was little to be done. Teeth are hard to reinsert, especially in young children. On the other hand, there would be little permanent harm from missing the teeth – maybe a slight lisp. It was hard to believe, but there was nothing we could do. I found the other tooth a half-hour later – it had ended up in the next room.

Within an hour, Wesley seemed to have forgotten all about the trauma. He was running around, laughing, insisting on being allowed to play behind the wheel of the family car, a favorite activity that includes pressing every button on the dashboard. But his smiles felt like reproaches: My lousy, negligent parents ripped the happiness out of my mouth – see? To this day he seems unaware of ever having had front teeth; reflection is not a toddlerly virtue.

His mother and I were nowhere near such a quick recovery. We each staggered through the rest of the day near tears, asking each other, “You okay?” The next day, we went to a playground where Wes played with a little girl a year older whose front teeth were missing due to a developmental problem. We were a little comforted when her father told us the gap gave her few problems. Yet we couldn’t get over it, and still can’t in some ways.

The poet Delmore Schwartz once said, “Existentialism means that no one else can take a bath for you.” Being a parent is that way, too: Nobody can prepare you for what you will feel when see your baby born, hear him yelp the first time, take his first steps. And nothing can prepare you for the pain you will feel when you see your child injured.

Since the accident we’ve heard it 100 times: All kids get injured in one way or another. When I was Wes’s age, I ended up getting stitches after another kid cracked my skull with a shovel – I still have a little bump there. The memories of the good times remain, but the scars do, too.

I knew I was close to my son, but in those first moments after the accident, I realized how physical our relationship was. I felt his pain. I felt his future pain, too – how strange it would be to be the only kid without front teeth for the next several years. Maybe, as some friends suggested, it will come to seem “cute.” But if I could have given him my own front teeth, I would have, on the spot. I’ve had several decades of good use out of them.

In trauma, this father found out something about the depth of his own love.