Every kid cycles through despair at the idea of death, it seems. Madison first asked me, "Am I going to die?" when she was three years old, in the car, after she had first grasped that animals die. My answer, "Yes. When you're very, very old," took her breath away at the time. She had not been expecting that to be my answer.
I think she has cycled through an evening of death rumination about every two years since then, and last night was the 9-year-old version.
"I don't care if I die," she wailed (while my heart twisted). "I won't even know about it. I just don't want you to die."
Again, I reassured her that I wouldn't be dying until she herself was very old, a grandmother. It wouldn't be while she needed me to take care of her. It didn't help, last night. "If I'm 70 and you're 100 when you die," she sobbed, "I'm already about 1/8 of the way there. And 1/7 of the way until Dad dies." She cried and cried at the unfairness of it all. She cried herself to sleep, with me snuggled next to her.
I don't like the whole death thing, either. What I didn't say to Madison was that I'm going to do my very best that, unlike with my parents, she'll actually miss me when I'm gone. (I mean: I don't miss my parents, and, at least as far as I know, they're not even dead yet.) I did feel grateful that I'm not sending her to school, that the times when we're apart is not one wasted minute.
I'm not sure what triggered last night's episode. Could it be that we'd just been playing Clue by the fire? (All that murder, you know...last night it was Professor Plum in the Lounge with the lead pipe.) Could it have been that we took them to see the movie Hotel for Dogs and the two kids in it were orphans? Maybe a combination of the two? Or maybe it was just that 2-year point. I don't exactly know.
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Oh my goodness, I'm going through the same thing with Ryan. Just the other night he broke down again about how he doesn't want to die and thinks there really ought to be scientists trying to figure out how to make people live forever. I did tell him that there are scientists who are trying to figure out how to make people live longer, but this was no help.
Other questions I've had to answer, and I'm sure you've been there, too--are things like "Do kids ever die?" "What can kill a kid?" "What if you're NOT old when you die?" (to my reassurances that everyone we know won't die until they're old)
To that last point--I think he is now afraid of old people. He's known several elderly people who have died in the past year and now doesn't want to be around his friends' grandmother. I wonder if he thinks she's going to die any minute.
At least he can't do math about it yet--1/8 of the way there!
Ryan seems to be on a 6 month cycle, but maybe as he gets older it'll stretch out a bit.
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