"Most of Alfonso Soriano's four kids are still so young they didn't know enough to say anything.

''The other one, she's 8,'' the Cubs left fielder said. And when she looked at him and asked how her grandmother could be so healthy and happy one day and gone the next, it was Soriano who didn't know what to say.

''I had to explain that nobody knows,'' he said quietly. ''It took everybody by surprise.''

It was barely a month ago, one day after the family returned home to the Dominican Republic from a trip to Disney World in Florida, when Soriano got the call that turned his world upside-down.

''She was feeling good in the afternoon when I talked to her,'' he said. ''And three hours later, my brother called me and said my mom is not feeling good.''

Andrea Soriano was just 63. She suffered a heart attack and didn't make it long enough to reach the hospital that night.

''She's in my mind every day,'' says Soriano, who has an especially hard time understanding how a heart attack was even possible after his mother had spent two weeks in Chicago last summer to have treatment to clear a blockage. Afterward, she'd said she felt younger and stronger."