EVERYTHING
FOR YOUR FAMILY
Early Years
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The posters were everywhere that week this summer, stapled at eye level to sycamore trees, power poles, and community bulletin boards. On each, the bright smiling face of our neighbor beamed. She was a lifetime resident, local musician and inescapable presence in our small rural community whose winding roads insist you slow down and wave hello. We saw her most often as we drove those roads and passed her cheerful house, which she had first pointed out to me, months ago, as the one with all the geraniums. We met her in the park too, as she walked her dog Lacy, a small black pooch that my young son was still getting used to. I imagined a future when we’d have time to visit her house, attend those famous concerts she produced right there. She’s dead now. Just like that, it seems, though I’ve heard from others that her illness was something she didn’t like to share. My 3-year-old, strapped in his car seat, stares at her smiling face on the homemade posters noting her passing and announcing the weekend’s memorial service. My son doesn’t miss much from back there. I wait for him to ask, and I wonder what I’ll say. I’ve been waiting, like the narrator in the Emily Dickinson poem who could not stop for death until, of course, he came to her door and picked her up, ever the gentleman. Last year, I caught myself preparing for death when my mother-in-law, my son’s beloved “Amah,” was diagnosed with cancer at exactly the same time my sister, his aunt, was diagnosed with a brain tumor. It seemed so different before, when I wasn’t a parent. Now I imagine not only the devastating loss but how to explain it to my son. Fortunately, both Grandma and Auntie are recovering nicely, but I know better than to relax. This is just a reprieve. In his baby book, there are photos of our old cat, Murphy, who lived just long enough to find out who was going to sleep in the baby bouncer she fancied for herself. And then succumbed to cancer. My son looks at the photographs and knows enough to say, “She died,” and moves on. In his storybooks, death has begun to make an appearance, but I am willing to confess that I find myself skipping over those pages where the mothers of Bambi and Babar are killed. At least in Little Red Riding Hood and Maurice Sendak’s “Pierre,” death is cheated. Grandma and Pierre both magically reappear after their alarming and gruesome departures. But the Wicked Witch of the East? I hadn’t seen Dorothy’s house coming down to squash her until it did and, then, there she was: dead. And her sister, some pages later, melted away into oblivion, too. There it is. Death. Inevitable. One day, my kid will turn all the pages himself and see what his parents have tried to protect him from. Daddy and I will have some explaining to do then. Of course, death is an opportunity for parents to invoke or introduce their views of life and afterlife, of spirit and faith, of nature. And through that, offer comfort and understanding. But how much can a child understand? One morning he notices the photo on the front page of the newspaper: a dead Iraqi lies in the street, face down. “Funny place to sleep,” he observes. And, I, his mother, agree, and keep the morning moving forward toward play and games and books filled with talking rabbits and frogs who go fishing. I am not up for that particular challenge today. For a child, the death of a neighbor or a stranger or even the family pet is more than just that: Like adults, in the death of others, children may well imagine their own and their parents. My child has already asked those questions, his little boy voice quivering with the enormity of it: Will you die Mommy? Will I? I know he will ask them again. Yes, my own mortality haunted me when I saw my late neighbor’s face on those posters. She was just four years older than me and those days, my heart seemed to beat a little louder, and I felt both stronger and more vulnerable. My instinct is to shield my child but I know this reaction is also about shielding myself from what is one of the most difficult challenges of parenting. What do our children have to know about death, about grief and loss? When do they have to know it? The answers are different for each family, depending on our individual circumstances, but we have one thing in common: We will all have to face it one day and we will have to help our children understand. We don’t protect our children by pretending. We protect them by giving them the tools, the truth, to understand. Lisa Alvarez, an English professor at Irvine Valley College, lives in Modjeska Canyon with her husband and 3-year-old son. |
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