How London's kids said goodbye to Queen Elizabeth–a brief photo interlude.

The kids of the UK turned out in full force to honor the Queen. Here's some of the cute stuff they said.

A few days after Queen Elizabeth's public funeral, which I'd attended (sort of) from the middle of the huge crowd in front of Buckingham Palace, I walked over to the floral tribute in Hyde Park Gardens, where I'd heard people had been slinging bouquet after bouquet into heaping piles. The smell of the flowers is really something, said the folks I met at the parade.

I went to see. And they were right. The smell was really something, and there were indeed piles and piles of flowers, but true to British form, nothing exactly looked piled, because everything was so gosh darn neat. The bouquets were stacked in pristine lines and arranged according to a pre-defined system. (Did they have a floral tribute map ready to go? One thinks it must be so.)

One corner of the floral, funereal labyrinth.

The state of most of the flowers, by the time I got there.

In any case, I was honestly touched by many of the tributes. Whatever you think of the royalty, and of the Queen herself, it's tough to withstand the onslaught of honest emotion in such a place. Especially when it comes from small people, who may not have many memories of the person being honored, but sure as anything feel the weight of the meaning-making going on.

Here are a few of my favorite tributes from kids (arranged in the common categories).

Category I: Enthusiastic

"I am veri sad that the queen daid but I am going to poot sum flowers der," said one kid, which is as succinct and accurate a description of the floral tribute project as I can come up with.

""Dead but shines!" said this kid. This card is the one that made me laugh, hard, startling a nearby group of mourners who had been softly crying before I arrived.

Category II: Not so enthusiastic

"It is sad that you have died," said Jax (age six). Over it?

"We love you bye," says this child, in what seems to be an exercise in doing the absolute minimum on a school assignment.

Category III: Sympathetic

From Clara: "I am sorry that your mother has died. I love you."

Category IV: Kind of creepy?

""Dear Queen, I really miss you. You should have died at 99 but at least your spirit doesn't die so you can steel see us." (Say what, now?)

And here is the queen with a dark, pungent hole of a mouth, and waving someone's disembodied heart with a dark, spike-hand.

Category V: Heartfelt

Words unintelligible, other than "Queen." But the sheer amount of hearts makes up for it!

Most of these fell into the heartfelt category, and for reasons Elizabeth herself alluded to twenty years ago:

Because there was honest grief there, from all kinds of humans—small and not-so-small. And if the grief sometimes seemed to me borrowed, or less for the woman than for the story she represented, well—I remind myself that I too am sometimes made very sad by stories and symbols, and that such grief feels the same whether or not it passes anyone's else's litmus test.

And for those of you who kept on scrolling, remember: As the child above put it, Elizabeth II isn't quite dead...she can "steel see us."