Shortly after putting the girls to bed the other night, I heard Cici crying and calling for me. When I went upstairs and asked what was wrong, she said, “I don’t want to die.”
Uh oh. I know all kids start to think about these issues eventually. For me, I remember it coming on when the idea of THE END OF THE WORLD was introduced in first-grade Sunday school class. That concept succeeded in turning me into a jiggling pile of jelly at the thought of the cosmic forces at play in the universe, and of my own ultimate insignificance.
But having gone through it myself at about the same age, and even remembering the experience with uncharacteristic vividness, didn’t really prepare me for what to say. So I said, “Oh, honey, you don’t need to worry about that. You’re going to live for a long, long time yet.”
“I wish,” she went on in a surprising turn of thought, “I could turn into a cat so I could live forever.”
“Well, honey,” I said, “cats don’t live forever, you know. They get old and die just like people.”
Oddly, this seemed to reassure her. “They do?”
“Uh huh. In fact, people live a lot longer than most animals do. Cats, dogs, horses – none of them live as long as people do.”
Silence, then: “What . . . about . . . trees?”
Yikes. There wasn’t much fancy footwork I could do to scuttle away from that one, so I just said, “Well, trees do live longer than people, it’s true. They’re just . . . lucky, I guess? But you really don’t need to worry about this, Cici. Why, you’re only five years old. You could live another eighty, or ninety, or maybe even a hundred years. That’s a very long time. Right?”
She seemed to be considering this very seriously; then, slowly and thoughtfully, as if unraveling a great mystery, she said, “You know . . . bees live in trees, Dad.”
“Oh?”
“I guess that’s where they make the honey!”
“I guess it is, Cici.”
And she’s right, you know. It is.
No comments:
Post a Comment