Work in progress

Did you notice how I neglected to post yesterday? I blew Nablow.

We're busy over here cracking shelled almonds.

I let Max eat his first one yesterday. Paranoid kook that I am, though, I only allowed him a nibble. Then he had to wait ten minutes before he could gobble up the rest of it. Half hour later, when I was pretty confident nothing terrible would happen, he popped the second one in his mouth.

Today he ate another two or three.

I think all is well and that, truly, he is no longer allergic to almonds.

Which is strange. Strangely good.

He keeps saying, "I can't believe I'm eating nuts!"

This morning he, Claire and I were hanging out in the living room, me on the floor while Claire shoved a million sparkly barrettes and clips into my hair, and Max lying across the couch.

He was thinking about death. Or, getting deaded, as he still calls it. "I don't want to die," he said.

"I don't want you to. I don't want to either."

We do not, around here, have the comfort of saying But then you'll go to heaven. And we'll all meet up there. Because that's not something we believe. I wish it were. Believe me. I fucking wish it were.

As my therapist used to say, death is the big one. The enormous issue with which we all grapple.

When I was in third grade, Max's age, our school system decided we should be taught classroom lessons in death. Not necessarily how to deal with it, or better yet, how to avoid it. Just...that people die.

My teacher showed us a movie. It was about a dying girl named Mary Ann. She had an unspecified illness and spent all her time in bed. Her mom spoon fed her ice cream. Then Mary Ann died. And she was shown, in blurry filmstrip haze, skipping through heavenly meadows of wildflowers.

That stupid movie shook me to my eight-year-old core. It had something to do with the matter-of-fact way the death was dealt with. The brilliant summer weather during which a girl my age had died. The awful distorted sounds of the seventies filmstrip.

We then, as a class, read a book about a boy who was picking blackberries with friends when he was stung by a bee and killed.

Good elementary school times.

Anyway, probably not as a direct result of my third-grade teachings, but I'm someone who thinks about death and dying a lot. More than the average person, I suspect.

Of course, I wonder if Max is heading down that road too, or if he is just at the age where he's realizing it all has to end at some point.

"I mean," he said, "how can the world not have ME in it?"

Just don't think about it is the best advice I know. Find your passion and your pleasures and focus on those.

Poor baby.

We're all just processing.

Comments

[Bev]

What a smart boy! His question crosses all socio-economic lines. I don't think anyone can imagine "the world [without] ME in it?" I like your response, we must focus on what is.

Happy Thanksgiving!

[Karen (formerly kcinnova)]

I'm rather shocked they dealt with death in such a way. I guess times have changed!

My mom gave us a book when her husband died and the kids were young: Lifetimes, by Bryan Mellonie and Robert Ingpen. It doesn't teach heaven but talks about the importance of what happens between birth and death. I recommend it!

[V-Grrrl @ Compost Studios]

Ah, death. It keeps us all mindful--or neurotic--about how we spend our time.

[Kristy]

When my oldest was four, I thought he was drifting off to sleep when he cried out. I murmured assurances that it was just a bad dream, and he said "I wasn't asleep. I was imagining I was dead and all I could see was black dark." We also are not religious, but I am open to telling him some people believe you go to heaven, some people believe you get to be reborn as another person or animal, some people believe it's just like resting (I avoided saying sleep because of sleep issues), some people believe you get to become part of the whole universe, but that no one can know for sure what happens.

Those "lessons" sound crazy! I think about this a lot, in a way, but more than death itself I think about how to accept it. I feel like I am a lot better with it than I used to be. It's just the human condition. Really, everything we do is an attempt to accept death, I think. And I think it's harder for us here and now because we are fortunate enough to have it be a relatively rare thing in our lives.

Have you read Phillip Pullman's His Dark materials trilogy? Don't let the crappy movie of The Golden Compass put you off, they are some of the best fiction out there, YA or otherwise. They all deal with the necessary process of losing innocence and accepting life's big truths, but the third book especially has some fascinating and brilliant treatments of the theme of accepting death.