"I just want something to look forward to."

That's the verbal time bomb 7-year-old Zetta Dovas left in the lap of her dad this month.

And so Oakland resident Ari Dovas did what any dad would do: He tried to defuse it with a holiday - in this case, Easter. So he set out to re-create the celebration he'd done with family friends for years, using what everyone uses nowadays: Zoom.

But no amount of huntable colored eggs, bunnies and computer cameras were going to erase the morose hovering over the Dovas' first-grader.

"I asked her, 'How was it?' and she said, 'It was a good try.' And I realized she was being sincere," he says. "I would've been offended if that was coming from an adult, but coming from her, she was legitimately appreciative that I tried. It wasn't what I wanted to hear or what I was used to - we're all dealing with pieces of loss and disappointment.

"I just realized, it can't just be: Let's do it the way we used to do it, but do it on Zoom."