Dear Nate,
I believe we ended our conversation tonight with “…so that’s about all that’s happened today” and while at the time that was true things quickly changed, and a second update is in order.
I remember being young and trying to wrap my head around concepts that are difficult to grasp. Those things in life that are mysterious even to adults and require equal parts science and spirituality. It’s difficult for young impressionable minds to wrap their heads around the details of scientific explanations but their ability to understand and observe the nuts and bolts of the everyday give them a thirst for knowledge of the unknown.
After we let you go Vella and I had some pillow talk, during which she told me that people “dive” and that she didn’t want daddy or meme and grandpa to “dive”. I was confused at first but quickly realized that she was referring to death. She wanted to talk about death. WOA!
At first I just listened. Listening to her train of thought on the subject was easily one of the most captivating things I’ve ever witnessed. I remember a long time ago coming across an article of a parent who gave their child a camera and asked them to take some pictures. I remember looking at those pictures and being interested in the details the child captured – it was as though through those pictures I was being offered a glimpse into their world. Tonight I got more than a glimpse, I got the keys to the kingdom.
I don’t know if I can properly weave the web of thoughts that have given Vella a basis for her understanding on the subject of death but I can say that her thoughts are based upon a notion of broken vs. fixed. I don’t want to get all academic here, but given my background the only thing I can relate it to is the notion of cultural relativism, you know, the concept that our version of the world is a product of our own thoughts, experiences and predisposition. In trying to understand an abstract concept such as death Vella has attempted to relate it to that which she knows to be concrete. She talked about the trains in the train yard crashing together and the bottles of cologne in the men’s magazine that she saw that were being smashed. When talking about the trains being broken she actually talked about them being made of glass and smashing together and breaking. She talked about the spider that weaves its web and catches flies and how the spider eats the flies. She talked about how a shark can bite you and you can bleed. She talked about how you bleed when you get a cut. She even gestured above her head (circling her little hand in a circle) when she talked about how everyone dies and how she didn’t want daddy or meme and grandpa to die, showing me that she has some sort of notion about life force. To her death was all those things, the cycle of life with the spider and the fly and the simple notion that something can be whole one minute and broken the next.
I’ve always enjoyed the way in which my mom would explain things in an uncensored manner; her straight forward answers and matter-of-fact air made me feel comfortable with topics that could potentially make me feel scared or overwhelmed. So tonight I tried to do just that, talk about things candidly but bypass the specifics of grief and grieving. I explained to her that a train doesn’t die because it’s not alive. We talked about the things that are material and have no life force and we talked about things that are alive. Every concept we discussed brought about a series of other question; a train is broken and is fixed, a finger can be broken too? The blood that runs out of cuts was related to the stuffing that is in a bear, glass bottles were related to teapots and curtains and window trim were related to staircases (don’t even ask about that one, it’s a whole other conversation). In the end she was able to grasp that being alive means that you have a beating heart, and in my final attempt to end the conversation so that she could get to bed I told her that I would show her the circulatory system in her body book. You know what her response to that was? “We will learn about trains tomorrow too ok?”
I know that it hurts your heart to be far away and missing out on these little occurrences so I promise to let you handle some of the other serious conversations we will need to have with the girls. When the time comes to discuss the birds and the bees the stage is all yours ok?
Lots of love and a little fairy dust,
xo Lauri
