June 12, 2002 | 9:10 AM

When someone in your family dies, everyone you�ve ever met comes over to your house and gives you cake and steak and baskets of fruit, and your refrigerator is so jammed that you can barely even shut it. Nobody eats any of it and after a few days it all goes bad and starts to smell.

But it�s OK. Because everybody comes back and cleans out your refrigerator for you because obviously you are too distraught to do it yourself.

They also vacuum. Sometimes several times a day. People love to vacuum your house when your father dies. Other things they like to do include dusting all the shelves, rearranging your books and records so that they are in alphabetical order, and watering all your plants.

Different people come in and out of the house all day and the plants get watered several times. Neither you nor your Mom care enough to send out a news bulletin that the plants have already been watered and so eventually the plants drown and they are dead.

When you go back to school after your dad dies, people stare at you in awe, as though you are a child star or notoriously wicked. They whisper about you behind your back.

If someone mentions something like a Father-Daughter picnic in front of you, her face immediately goes beet red and she profusely apologizes between embarresed giggles.

Things are like that for awhile when your dad dies and you are twelve years old.

Then it gets a whole lot worse.