How Not to Calm a Child on a Plane (35 page)

twenty-four

THE UNDYING TRUTH

W
e are spending a perfect day at the park.

The daughter is in the sandbox, playing with a little boy named Giacomo while his mother sits on a nearby bench. Though we are the only two adults here, the mother and I are not friends, nor are we engaged in idle-playground new-mom chitchat. That's because she speaks no English, and I speak no Italian; as I said, it's a
perfect
day. (I have always felt—and hated—the pressure to start a friendship with another mother based solely on the fact that we both had unsafe intercourse with our respective spouses in roughly the same twelve-month time span. Sorry, ladies—simultaneous bonking does not a BFF make.)

Giacomo, however,
does
speak English, and I am enjoying the sounds of his adorable, four-year-old
Italian-waiter accent as he and my kid chat their way through random topics, every one of them a passionate non sequitur.

Giacomo: “THE SUN, EEEEEET IS SO YELLLLLOW AND RRRROUND!”

My Kid: “I HAVE PINK SANDALS!”

Giacomo: “I AM VERRRRRY GOOOOD AT SWEEMMING!”

My Kid: “MY UNCLE IAN IS ALLERGIC TO PEANUTS!”

Giacomo: “DOOO YOOOOU LIIIEEEKE DOGS-AH?!”

My Kid: “I SAW A FAIRY ONCE!”

Then Giacomo lobs, “MY PAPA, 'E IS A DOCTOR-RR-EH, BUT TODAY 'E IS A LEEEETTLE BEET SICK.”

My daughter asks why is he sick. Did he eat too much candy? (Yes, that is one of the lies that I tell her. It's just my attempt to save her from my own sick Skittles dependency from which I suffer on an hourly basis.)

Giacomo says, “EH, NO. HE HAS DE FLU AND 'E WILL BE BETTERRRR, MAYBE TOMORROW. BUT ONE DAY 'E WEEEEELL BE DEAD.”

My daughter, clearly alarmed by this nuclear bomb of information, half says/half questions, “HE'S NOT GOING TO DIE? . . .”

Giacomo says with a cheerful smile, “EH, YES, ONE DAY HE WILL DIE. AND SO TOO WEEEEELL YOUR MOTHERRR.”

My daughter looks at Giacomo like he has just slapped her across the cheek with a full-grown halibut. And then she proceeds to cry her fish-slapped face off.

I look to Giacomo's mom, who, native language notwithstanding, doesn't seem as alarmed as she really ought to be, considering that her son has clearly just shoved my daughter into an emotional abyss.

Giacomo turns and says something to her in Italian (“BLA BLA BLA BLA MOR-TAY”), his chubby little sand-covered hands gesturing cartoonishly. His mother listens, then shrugs and nods at me as if to say, “Eh, yes, someday you too will be dead, eh?”
^*

Then Giacomo nods and says one more time (because once wasn't enough), “YES, YOUR MOTHERRRR, ONE DAY-EE SHE WEEELL BE DEAD.” He then shrugs his little shoulders and returns to building a sand castle, or perhaps it was a sand mortuary, I don't recall.

Thanks, Giacomo, you little mini-sadist. I was hoping to address this issue a whole lot later, maybe over some floating Sea Monkeys, but I guess now is as good a time as any.

I take my little blonde wailing mess into my chest, wrap my arms around her, and utter some long “sssshhhh” sounds that I believe to be reassuring. She pulls away, looks me straight in the eyes, and asks between sobs, “IS IT TRUE, MOMMY? ARE YOU GOING TO DIE?”

Now I am sure there's a right way to answer this question, but I am also sure that I couldn't find the answer, not even if I had a million monkeys Googling on a million laptops for a period of eight to ten weeks.

It occurs to me that I could just lie and say, “Of course not, silly! That's never going to happen!” But I won't lie.
^*
When it comes to my kid, I believe in total honesty, mainly because I have the memory of a thumbtack, and keeping track of lies is a practical impossibility for me; also because I fear the sick and ironic sense of humor of an entity/being/god-thingy who would strike me down instantly for telling such a whopper.

But I'm also unsure how to tell this particular truth. I come from a long line of emotional avoiders, especially where death is involved. I am obsessed with it.
^†

And while other women like to visualize their weddings or map out their fantasy European vacations, I like to plan my own funeral.
^‡
§

“
IS IT TRUE, MOMMY?
”

On the other hand—and this is a big, wart-covered hand—I am unmatched in my ability to believe that I and my loved ones are all immortal (despite the fact that none of us are vampires—not proven, anyway). Like the majority of idiots in our blissfully dopey North American culture, I have done a very good job, thank-you-very-much, of living in total avoidance of death.

Point of fact: A few years ago, just a few months after the death of my great-aunt Naomi (one of the craziest, loudest, most foul-mouthed, and wonderful old bats you could ever hope to meet), I was on the phone with my dad when he said, “I was talking to your brother the other day. He didn't know that Naomi had died. Isn't that weird?” I wanted to say, “No, Dad, that's not weird. What's weird is the fact that none of us thought to call and tell him that she'd died.
That's
what's weird—the fact that our entire freaking family is in denial of our mortality!” Instead, I said, “Yeah, Dad. That is weird.”

“
IS IT TRUE, MOMMY?
”

I am experiencing complete mental paralysis; give me the existence of God . . . How gravity works . . . Bestiality even. I'll explain them all a thousand ways and with pictures. Just please, not this one.

“
IS IT TRUE?
”

This moment is going to take delicacy and tact. And sensitivity. So I look her straight in the eyes, and with all the sincerity I can muster I say, “Hey, are you hungry for ice cream, cuz I sure am!!”

But no, the child is not hungry for ice cream. Not for the first time since ever.

As my mind races to find new evasion tactics, the kid stops crying and looks at me with a fake smile on her face and an odd sense of calm. She asks again, “IS IT TRUE, MOMMY? ARE YOU GOING TO DIE?”

With every iota of energy in my body, I fight the urge to avoid, deflect, joke, or subject-change. Instead, I take a deep breath and say, “One day, a very, very, very, very, very, very long time from now . . .
yes
.”

I start to back that up with some Lion King “circle of life” rhetoric, how “if nothing ever died, then there would be no room for anything else to grow . . . ,” but I have lost her. If the earlier tears were a storm, she is now at a Category 5 Typhoon. And yet as unmoored as this makes me feel, there is a tiny part of me that is watching her and marveling at the depth of her sadness. Here I am, decades older than this kid, and I have never in my life felt this kind of grief (because, as I mentioned, I come from a family of emotional moe-rons).

Unbelievably, some mothering instinct in me kicks in. I hold her and rock her and say over and over how it's not going to happen for a long time, then touch every wooden surface we pass as I carry her (all forty-nine pounds of her) four blocks home.

She calms down enough that her wailing becomes a whimper. I bring her into the house where we find her dad. He can see from her tear-stained, poppy-red face that something emotionally gnarly has gone down. This is confirmed when she flings herself into his chest and then looks into his face and says, “I'm really going to miss Mommy.”

He gives me a “What the fo?” look, and it takes me a moment but finally I understand what is going on in that troubled head of hers: she has taken Giacomo at his word. “One day, your mother will die.” According to my four-year-old, death isn't a universal concept to be grasped, absorbed, and wrestled with for a lifetime. It's a selective piece of bad news and apparently applies to only me. (And maybe Giacomo's dad.)

As her tears subside, I decide to let her misunderstanding lie, at least for the moment. We've had enough trauma for one afternoon, and I don't have the heart to correct her misinterpretation by informing her that one day not only will I die, but so will her dad, and her grandparents, and her dog, her fish, her roly-polies in the garden, and her friends.

And so, too, will she.

And now it's not just for her sake that I hold back this unwieldy truth. Because as that singular thought leaps across my taxed synapses, emotional ignoramus that I may be, I start to cry too. And so as her confounded dad watches in utter confusion, I allow my frustration with small, socially advanced Italian children to fall by the wayside, and I hug her and stroke her hair and pray to the ironic being in the sky for as many sandbox days as she or he sees fit to give us, wood touches or not.