Death and the Trashman

If I believed that my reply were made
To one who to the world would e'er return,
This flame without more flickering would stand still;

But inasmuch as never from this depth
Did any one return, if I hear true,
Without the fear of infamy I answer. . .

We spent yesterday with my parents, who live a couple of hours away. I sometimes think we see them less frequently now that we’re nearby than when we lived fifteen hours away. Maybe you just make more effort to get together when it involves planning a big trip, instead of just riding over for the day, and both my parents are what we call homebodies. We had a fairly typical visit—my mother was cooking when we got there, we climbed up into the treehouse my father is building (more about which later, when I have some pictures!), we walked around the pond and caught a couple of slow, cold lizards. Will spent the afternoon playing outside, trying to keep me or Mama between him and Ginger, my parents’ sweet lab who only wants to love him. Chris went kayaking while Mama and I took the kids to see my grandmother; during the drive, Laura asked to listen to her new Cheetah Girls cd in the car, while Will wanted the sunroof on the car open.

We also indulged in one of our other most usual activities, reviewing my father’s trash finds. Ever since I can remember, if my family went driving for any length of time, you could count on my father for two things: first, we would never ever stop if you wanted an Icee or to look at a funky antiques stop, and second, we would stop if we passed something interesting in a dump along the way. I couldn’t even begin to make a list here of all the things he’s scavenged over the years, so let’s just say that the man hates to see anything wasted, whether it’s something you think is broken or just paper towels, which I have this memory I think is imagined of him having calculated to the sheet how much each one cost. He exemplifies that old adage, one man’s trash is another man’s treasure. This time he did pretty good: he found a bike for Laura. We’d thought about buying her one for her birthday this year; she’s outgrown her old bike something awful, but because she’s just a tad too short for the next size up, we’d decided to hold off and get her one this summer. But voila, my father has a newly fixed up and polished bike for her, rescued from a friend who was—no lie—going to throw it away after he took off the tires to put on his floating dock. It’s actually about the right size for her, and she loves it; I love not having to buy a new one, and I’m sure I’ll eventually learn not to see the “Pretty Lady” label on the side.

My father actually consulted with us before giving us the bike, like we were grown adults and in charge of Laura, which was a fascinating experience for me, since my parents, with the best of intentions, still say things to us like, don’t you think their bedtime is a little too late? We had some debate about whether we could get the bike in or on the car, given that we had the proverbial load of other stuff in the back and a kayak on top. Finally we got the bike loaded as my father gave Laura what amounted to a little lecture. The only condition under which he gave her this bike is that she not ride it out of our yard without us. She could not fly down the driveway and into the road in front of the house. She couldn’t ride in the neighborhood without her parents. He knew a family who got a four-wheeler for Christmas and accidentally flipped it, killing one of the riders. If she rides in the road, that could be the end of her. Etcetera. Laura managed to refrain from rolling her eyes, since she knows the road/yard rules quite well—we have high school drivers and log trucks barreling past our house regularly, and Will’s not even allowed in the front yard at all unless he’s with Laura or a grownup. She knows the drill. After we piled into the car and had rolled down the window for one last goodbye, he said to her something like this: “Somebody offered me all the money in North America for yall today, and I said no. I wouldn’t take all the money and even the chance to hunt in North Dakota for you all, so you need to be careful riding that bike, and your daddy needs to be careful driving home.” My father is a singularly undemonstrative man, who at times seems to even cringe when you hug him goodbye, so I can’t swear to be reproducing this remarkable statement with any accuracy, since I have never heard anything like it from him before. But you get the gist.

Much later than night, after the drive home, Laura started asking me questions about her other grandfather, Chris’s dad, who has pancreatic cancer and is in the hospital at the moment. The progress of his disease has mystified us all, since he was diagnosed in June 2004—we were told at the time he wouldn’t see Christmas. Two Christmases later, he’s had chemotherapy almost every week since but still recently bought a table saw for some new woodworking projects he’s been interested in. He’s not doing well at the moment, however, hospitalized for over a week with a variety of the kinds of aliments cancer sufferers face. The questions started when Laura asked me if Papa Adrian would be out of the hospital this weekend: we don’t know. Does he feel very bad? Yes, but they’re giving him medicine at the hospital to help him feel better. What’s going to happen to him? We don’t know. He might get a little better and come home from the hospital for a while, but he’s very sick and he will probably die before it’s all over with. What do I think it feels like to die? Do you feel anything, or do you just stop? What do I think heaven is like? Wouldn’t it be interesting if somebody went to heaven and then came back and told us what it was like?

In fact, Laura seems to have discovered recently that we could shuffle off this mortal coil any old time. Her class finished a novel about a little girl separated from her family during the Holocaust recently, which distressed her at times and me too, although the book had, unlike so many real Holocaust stories, a happy reunion at the end. (They’re just starting the Holocaust unit, which may kill me before it’s over—the butterflies from last year! But that’s a post for another day.) The headline of The Observer the other day read “10-YEAR-OLD GIRL DIES IN SHOOTING”; I kept the paper turned face down for most of the morning, but at some point I must’ve forgotten while I was moving things around in the kitchen, and later, I saw Chris and Laura talking about it, although I couldn’t hear and thought it best to let them talk it over. So many movies for kids have missing parents—she got Because of Winn Dixie for Christmas, complete with a run-away mother, and never mind practically ever single Disney movie ever made, but especially Bambi. She’s had lots of reminders lately of the idea of mortality, that a parent or grandparent might be gone, and if I wasn’t sure of that, I’d know it after reading the Christmas card she made me at school:

Merry Christmas Mom. Without you this family would fall apart. Without you the household would be in disaster. I don’t know what I would do without you. In Elvis’s words, “I’ll have a blue Christmas without you.” And I really would if you were gone. Lots of love, Laura.

I used to have these nightmares when Laura was a baby and we lived far from any of our family that some crazed ax-murderer would break into our house and kill me and Chris—or in the less violent versions, we would just somehow simultaneously die—leaving Laura alone and helpless. Worse, this mass parental death would happen on a Friday afternoon, so it wouldn’t be until we didn’t show up for work Monday that anybody made any effort to check on us to find our starved baby girl. Anytime Chris is gone longer than I think he should be, I start imagining in which ditch his lifeless body might be resting, the car still a smoking ruin over his corpse. I certainly understand Laura’s fear of being left, although now I’m a little more confident that no insane person wielding blunt objects is likely to break in, and also that both Laura and Will would somehow survive if something were to happen to me or Chris.

So last night, I told her yes, I do think it would be interesting if somebody could come back and tell us about heaven. Even though by now it was way past her bedtime, I told her I think it might hurt to die, but that medicine can help make you more comfortable, and it probably doesn’t feel like anything after you die, because your soul leaves your body. I told about Spook, the new Mary Roach book I just finished reading, subtitled Science Tackles the Afterlife, a whole book about scientists trying to study what happens to us when we die. What did they find out, she wondered? In a nutshell, we don’t know. That was a lot of words to end up with that answer, wasn’t it? It sure was, but interesting words. I told her just a tiny little bit about Dante’s Inferno. I told her that I believed in something beyond this life, if not a pearly gated heaven, and that I used to imagine Heaven was the place I would find out all the answers in death that I never knew in life, sort of the ultimate reference library, but now that I hoped I’d have more interesting things to do in the afterlife than worry about who built Stonehenge or what happened to my favorite bracelet I lost.

For the first time in one of our long talks, she showed no signs of impatience, although I wondered if perhaps she’d get better answers from a parent who was a somewhat less left-wing wacko liberal. Fortunately or not, though, she’s stuck with me and Chris, so left-wing wacko answers are what she gets—less grounded in the Word than in words. While I know she’s worried about her grandfather, I think she’s translated that idea of death to the less immediate but more fearful notion that she or her parents might die (I’m not sure it’s occurred to her to worry about Will just yet). Chris’s father in the hospital, my father’s warning about the new bike, watching ET with my mother the other day—all these things translate to new awareness in which my daughter begins to ask herself those eternal questions, the ones that survive each of us. I don’t normally hide Observer headlines from her—although talking about a girl being shot accidentally by her brother the day after Christmas wasn’t high on my agenda this week—but sometimes I wish I could. “Small children, small troubles. Big children, big troubles.” And not even troubles so much, just questions I can’t answer for her, and wouldn’t if I could, as she begins to answer them now for herself.