Aug 21
I’m not ready for this sort of thing…
I’ve been doing a lot of reading today, filling my head with brilliant ideas on what to write about. A simple and shocking post from Dad Gone Mad has blown all of that out of the water. So instead of producing an erudite, layman’s commentary on pop-psychology and neuroscience or a lighthearted story about the pain of putting my books into storage for a few months, I am sitting at my desk in state somewhere between frozen and shaking, with my jaw clenched and August & Everything After playing on repeat in iTunes.
And I need to write about Death.
Today, DGM had to tell his son that his six-year-old friend had died. For me, his post brought to the forefront how much my attitude toward that inevitable part of life has changed since becoming a parent. The capital letter I used above is indicative of the shift.
BC (Before Caspar), Death never shook me. I had no tears when Opa, a very important figure in my life, died, and at Oma’s funeral I wanted to see her body before the cremation not to say goodbye but out of intellectual curiosity. That may seem bizarre and callous to some people in spite of the fact that I love her and miss her to this day. But there is a reason this blog isn’t called The Emo Mum.
When life is a wonderful, amazing, abstract experiment, it is easy to look, like Henry Miller, upon decay as being “just as wonderful and rich an expression of life as growth”, whether that decay is premature or not. It is easy to know that “to deny one is to deny the other”.
But children are not abstract. And…
Death is not for children. DGM
So now Death is something I need distance from. It is no longer earthy. It no longer human. It is an awful presence incompatible with the effortless, all-encompassing care that exists within me as a parent.
Children are written in the future tense. So I have to try, like DGM and the Counting Crows, to tell myself the things I try to tell myself to make myself forget, and while i continue to know that life and death are inextricably bound together, I can no longer feel at ease with it.
August 23rd, 2007 at 12:07 am
I can understand the feeling that death isn’t something easy to explain to children, it’s just that, maybe we shouldn’t explain it the way we see it. Children have a way of putting things into perspective that we have lost long before. In that sense, they are stronger than us.
Something I learnt when I was young when my friends passed away. Death isn’t the a grievance of loss, but a celebration of life. Maybe in that sense, I’m comfortable with it when I remember those that I have lost all these years.