Monitoring My Daughter’s Behavior And Processing Her Feelings About A Dead Boy
After she hops off the bus, before she mentions the dead boy, my daughter says “I got moved to the front of the bus, daddy, but don’t worry. I’m not in trouble.” This is how my daughter usually begins a story about being in trouble. But today is different. Everything is different. “I’m in charge of putting my arm up like this,” she creates a rigid barrier with her little arm, “and blocking the big kids until the kindergarteners get off.”
“Oh that’s cool,” I reply, “Look at you. Protecting little kids. Keeping them safe. That’s a pretty important job.” She shrugs, preoccupied by death.
“Here’s a note from the principal,” she says, handing me a piece of yellow paper, “Sully died.”
“Sully what?”
“He died. They won’t tell us why. Or how, I mean. The note tells about how it’s always a tragedy when a young life is taken and to help me process my feelings and monitor my behavior because every little kid is different about dead people.”
My daughter and I are walking on a sidewalk, holding hands, and there are people and cars and birds. Scattered bones of various beings from various times are buried in the earth. The sky is crowded with spirits. Who could count all the people waiting in line to be born? The rest of us just stumble around and starve to death for love.
I scan the yellow document and give my daughter a once over. “Your behavior’s checking out fine. How do you feel?”
“I feel like some chow mein and honey walnut shrimp.”
*
I snagged an extra fortune cookie from the Panda Express lady and, after we took turns opening and reading ours, I told my daughter to crack open Sully’s. It said Everything will soon come your way.
“Hardly!” my son chirped and I stared him down with irritated slits. “Or maybe,” he fumbled for recovery, “life is just a big long coma and when you die, you wake up and what you thought was your life was actually just a coma hallucination.” My son is 14 and he’s unusually obsessed with comas. My daughter, on principle, disagrees with every word he says.
“Yesterday,” she pauses here as if she trips in the difference between yesterday and today, “um, yesterday, me and Sully were partners and our job was to write a topic sentence but it couldn’t be boring. It had to have a hook. Our teacher calls them Grabber Sentences.”
“Yeah? What was your Grabber sentence.”
She laughs as she says “‘I will never forget the time I set the woods on fire.’ Sully thought of it. Sully is SO funny.” She stops laughing. “Or was so funny?”
No one trained me in the art of processing my daughter’s grieving feelings or monitoring her behavior to discern her unique reaction to death. I want to engulf her in my arms while all the bad guys riddle my body with bullets. I want to build her a castle. I want to write her a song.
“Do you remember the last thing Sully told you, sweetie.”
“Yeah. He said ‘See you tomorrow’ and then ran away.”
Me and my kids sit in Panda Express and silently wrestle with Sully’s last words. No one is crying. No one is visibly upset. But we sit together in a richer, more vibrant way, together, today, eating chow mein. Everything, every last bit of it, will soon come our way. We will never forget the time we set the woods on fire.
_____________
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that last paragraph, you’re the cowboy on the bucking horse and your arm is in the air and you are half in the most love you’ve ever been and half terrified. you’ve got a case of the writer. great words.
There’s something about a child’s window to death, and it makes my heart ache to be able to crawl back inside that house of being new, yet not because of knowing how it changes. And that’s where a parent falls into that twisted bit of wanting to be the protector and the mentor and it is all of the balancing, isn’t it? Such a seesaw, and thankfully they do a fantastic job of running up and down that teeter totter so that we never get too terribly comfortable sitting on one end. I love them for it all. Best ride in the park.
Way to make me cry, Sully.
Jerk.
Just kidding.
Say hi to Mother Teresa for me.
Oh this is heart breaking on so many levels. I love your insight and wish I had some kind of easy fix, but my God, what a tragedy.
I love you. Geeeezus. WRITE THAT. man.
Nice. Though I was excited at the thought that you son was obsessed with comas, and thought life was a coma, in the punctuation sense of the world. Which it is in a way, a sequence of them. At the end there is a period.
Ugh. I’m so sorry about Sully.
Is AMERICA Still Burning its Children Alive At BOHEMIAN GROVE? Wait, Never mind, you are…
NO FUCKING WONDER ALL ARE UNDER A GENERAL GLOBAL CURSE. WELCOME TO THE END OF DAYS BITCHES HA HA HA HA HA HA LET THE UNITED NATIONS MAKE A DEAL WITH THE DEVIL AND SPILLED THE BLOOD ON YOU KIDS HEADS 
ITS WRITTEN ALREADY IN ANCIENT HOLY BOOKS. REPENT THE KINGDOM OF GOD IS AT HAND! http://www.joshuashanholtz.com
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