KABUL — As evening takes over Kabul, daylight fading to gray, 3-year-old Benyamin senses that his father should be coming home from work about now.

But it’s been months since a bombing killed his “Aba,’’ Sabawoon Kakar, and eight other Afghan journalists. Benyamin cries and nags his mother, Mashal Sadat Kakar: Where is Aba? When is Aba coming home?

How do you explain death to a 3-year-old? Kakar, her baby, Sarfarz, in her arms, tries to distract him with toys. But when Benyamin keeps crying, she takes him to the balcony and points to the brightest star shining through Kabul’s polluted sky.

“Aba is there,’’ she says.

The war in Afghanistan is disproportionately killing young men, and it is leaving behind a generation defined by that loss. Children like Benyamin will have only early memories of their fathers, and the deaths will shape their lives even as true recollections fade. Babies like Sarfarz will have even less, with death taking fathers they will never know.

Carrying it all are the tens of thousands of widows the war has created since 2001. Like Kakar, they are left to raise families in a country with a dearth of economic opportunity and plagued by a war that kills 50 people a day.

And more, the women are made painfully aware that their society sees them as possessions. A new widow often must rely completely on her husband’s family, which is likely to demand that she marry the next available brother or cousin. The women usually have little say.

As Afghanistan’s long war took an even deadlier turn, the lives of these young widows became a struggle that deprived them of even the chance to mourn. For some, including Kakar, their grief was punctuated by the pain of childbirth, bringing babies into a world consumed by despair. Reminders of their lost loves became their anchors in a newly unstable world.

Rahila Shams was also widowed — at age 22, six months pregnant with her second daughter. Her husband, Ali Dost Shams, a district governor, was killed in a Taliban raid in April. When her daughter was born, the family named her Shamsia, after the father she will never meet.

“I lost my love, my friend, and the father of my two daughters. Everyone says, ‘Stay strong,’ but no one says how,’’ Shams said.

Each of the women the Times spoke with said she had found love in marriage, even if it took time in a culture where arranged matches remain the rule.

For Sabawoon and Mashal Kakar, their marriage was a love match from the start. Their son Benyamin added joy to the fulfilling life they were building together.

Kakar was at her desk at work the morning of April 30 when she got a message alerting her to an explosion in the Shashdarak neighborhood, where Ali Kakar’s office was.

“When I called him, he picked up his phone and said, ‘Mashal jan, I am dying,’’’ Kakar said.

When she was told that Sabawoon had died, “Everything turned dark, like night,’’ Kakar said.

In the months after their husbands were killed, the young widows were not only grappling with grief and their children’s confusion, but also dreading the inevitability of being passed along within their husbands’ families.

Kakar’s in-laws called her and asked her to join them in Helmand. She politely turned them down. They grew more blunt, she said, arguing it was not good for a young woman and her two children to be in Kabul on their own.

“I told them I’m an educated woman and I can handle my life,’’ Kakar said.

For other women, the prospects are grim, their choices and say in shaping their futures much more limited.

When Shams visited the gynecologist after her husband’s death, the doctor attempted to console her by telling a story of her own cousin who was killed in the west of the country just months earlier.

“You are not alone,’’ she told Shams. “There are many women like you in Afghanistan.’’