Vol. 9: On Death

What the heck do I say now?

Part of being a parent is having your heart broken just a tiny bit each day.

When my son tells me a friend wasn’t nice to him; when he exhibits a sign that he’s growing just a bit more independent and thus, just a tiny bit further away from his dad (as he did this week when he figured out how to work a jacket zipper by himself, meaning there’s one less thing he needs me for); when he sobs in my arms because we can’t quite find a beloved Matchbox car, ninety-nine cents of plastic and metal that, to my son, is priceless.

These tiny moments are daily reminders of the immenseness with which we love our children.

Over time, you get used to them. You even come to expect them.

But recently, my son asked a question that absolutely leveled my wife and me, that broke our hearts into a thousand tiny pieces.

“When you die, people stop loving you?” he asked from the back seat of our truck.

Emily and I sat in silence, throttled by the idea that we had to confront such a heavy conversation with our son so much sooner than we ever had anticipated.

We assured him that the people who love you will always love you, in life or death. We told him that death changes nothing in regards to how much we love people. We told if anything, death amplifies the love we feel. We told him that, in ways he can’t quite comprehend yet (because we can’t quite comprehend them ourselves yet), Emily and I love our own mothers in death in ways we never did in life.

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If you know anything about my wife and me (as most subscribers to this newsletter likely do), you know that we both lost our mothers when we were relatively young.

Emily was twenty-six when her mother succumbed to cancer in the brain, I was thirty when we lost my mom to cancer in the ovaries. And while their lives and the lessons they imparted on us factor in nearly everything we do, while we remember them vividly, regularly, and with joy, the darkness of their deaths cast a very long shadow over our lives.

How could they not?

We’ve done so much without moms.

We got married without moms. We moved from our longtime home to a place where we hope to raise a family without moms. We had two children and a miscarriage without the wisdom and guidance that only mothers can provide.

Every time we cross the new threshold of life, we’re reminded of them. But every time we revel in the tiny mundanity of parenting and of marriage, we’re reminded of them, too.

Lately, our son has been asking about the grandmas he’ll never have, presumably because he’s recently started preschool where his classmates no doubt mention their own grandmothers, the magical mystical maternal lovecreatures that it seems every other child in our orbit has at least one of.

He points his grandmothers out in pictures and tries his hardest to remember their names before asking us, “What’s her name, again?”

“That’s Susie,” I say.

“That’s Carol,” Emily says.

“Who is she?”

“She’s your grandma.”

Sometimes, he asks what happened to them, wondering if they got better when told they were sick. He asks if it was their hearts that broke, meaning as much in a very literal sense. We tell him as honestly as we can tell a three-year-old.

We explain how just as he has two grandfathers, both very present in his little life, so too did he have two grandmas, even if they never had the chance to meet.

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Last week’s newsletter addressed the fact that Emily and I are raising our kids in a religion-free household. For us, that’s the right choice because that’s who we are.

But when it comes to moments like these, part of me wishes I had my own faith to lean in to, if for no other selfish reason than it would give me an easy out when my three-year-old asks what happens when we die.

Because, though he hasn’t quite asked us that big of a question just yet, it’s coming. Once his brain makes the connection that he too is mortal, he’ll no doubt drop the big one on us.

And the best I’ll be able to offer him is the fact that I have no idea, hug him as tight as I can, and wish my mom was still around so I could ask her for some advice.