eta; this refers to today’s earlier post. Thank you for your condolences.
Am writing off the top of my head. Forgive me for not editing this closely to make it a coherent spelled-checked whole, but I want to get this out there. Please indulge me.
It’s hard to talk about death with our children but I think it’s important that we do. I’d like to hear your thoughts on this. How did your parents help you deal with death when you were a kid? How do you help your kids deal with it now?
We’ve had a number of deaths in our circle.
– Mark’s grandmother
– our neighbor
– the wife of a friend
– the husband of a friend
– a child at my daughter’s school
These are just a few, but and we’ve attended services, with our daughters, for each one. For me, this is one of the hardest things we can do as a parent but it is something we need to do. Otherwise how do they learn to cope with it later on?
It’s so difficult to talk openly with our children about the inevitable end. When you’re a child the days are so long, but there it is, death, at the end of a long twisting road, a looming black hole you need to step through and you don’t know what’s going to happen when you do.
When I was a kid my parents told me that dying was “just like sleeping.” I know they said that to console me, but it only made it worse.
I remember crying myself to sleep just thinking about it. And you know what? It still affects me. It happens at night sometimes, striking me out of the blue. I’ll be on the cusp of falling asleep when I suddenly remember I’m going to die. I’m jolted awake. I think of my grandmother and ask her to help me. And then I push the thought away.
Our lives have a time limit, and fortunately or unfortunately we don’t know what that time limit is. We have one chance to do it right.
I am tempted, but I can’t really soften the blow for the girls by telling them with certainty that there is a heaven and that our relatives are waiting for us on a puffy cloud somewhere and looking down on us, guiding our path through life. I tell them that this is a possibility. Some believe it is so. I want to believe it too, because it makes that black hole less frightening. But I am beholden to the science. I suppose that makes me an agnostic. I believe there is More Than We Can Possibly Understand and I’m open to the possibility.
Mark is an atheist. He believes that once we’re dead we are worm food. And this is what we tell the girls. Oh, we don’t say it in a way that sounds as harsh as the way I just tapped it out, but we tell them a version of it.
You know the song Calendar Girl by the Stars?
“I dreamed I was dying; as I so often do,
And when I awoke I was sure it was true,
I ran to the window; threw my head to the sky
And said whoever is up there, please don’t let me die
But I can’t live forever, I can’t always be
One day I’ll be sand on a beach by a sea …”
This is what we tell them. We live long lives, we die, and we become part of the earth that nourished us while we were alive.
We tell them that it’s important to love the people who are close to us, and to try to be kind to those around us because we don’t know what’s going on deep in their hearts. We tell them that it’s our job to try to make the world a better place while we are here.
Oh there’s that lump and the blurry keyboard again. I’m sorry friends. I am so sad today.
