Existential conversations with my daughter.

[rivka]

Alex: How old is the real baby Jesus now? (NB: We have recently discussed the fact that "the real baby Jesus" won't be at our Christmas pageant because that story happened a long time ago.)

Me: Um. The real baby Jesus was born very very long ago, thousands of years, and people can't live for that many years. So he died a long time ago. (Considers, and rejects, introducing the idea that some people believe in the Resurrection.)

Alex: Why?

Me: ...Because the earth is very old, and people have lived on earth for such a very long time. They were born, they grew up, they got old, and they died, and then new people grew up and got old and died. That's how it is.

Alex: (firmly) I'm never, ever going to die.

Me: Good! (suddenly realizes where this probably came from.) ...You know, usually children *don't* die. Children almost always grow up and live for a long time.

Alex: What if they have a long sickness?

Me: Even when children have a long sickness, they usually don't die. Their doctors can usually figure out the right medicine to give them.

Alex: (sounding satisfied) Their doctors are detectives.

Me: That's right.

---

I guess that to a kid who has only encountered the concept of death as an intimate and personal tragedy (Grandma Nancy had a long sickness, and she died, and it's so sad that Papa still sometimes cries when we talk about it), the idea that most people who have ever lived are dead now is incomprehensible.

It's not just the idea that everyone dies someday, although we have introduced that idea and apparently it didn't take. It's the idea of generations upon generations of dead people. Laura and Mary Ingalls are long dead now, and so is Blackbeard, and so is everyone else who lived in the "old-fashioned times" that Alex has been interested in learning about, and there were, literally, countless generations who lived and died before them.

Golden boys and girls all must
Like chimney sweepers, come to dust.

And this is not the sort of thing I tend to think about, until I suddenly find myself saddled with the responsibility of explaining it.

Comments

[ailbhe]

You are so good at this stuff.

What do you do for "When am I going to be grown up enough to die?"

[rivka.livejournal.com]

What do you do for "When am I going to be grown up enough to die?"

Oh jeez. Honestly? I would probably cry.

And then I think I'd have to admit that we don't know for sure when any person will die, that most people live to be quite old and some die when they're not old at all. And that the best we can do is to try to take care of each other and stay healthy: wear our seatbelts, cross the street carefully, eat healthy foods, visit the doctor, stay away from guns...

Linnea asked?

[ailbhe]

Often, she said glumly.

Also, "If you're finished growing, you're going to die, right?"

She's not upset by this stuff, though it's obviously on her mind. My mum was a bit upset by it. I'm not thrilled.

Mainly, I've stuck with "Not for a long, long, long time."

[eeyorerin]

I am so glad that we live in an age and a place where we can say things like "usually children don't die."

[nancylebov.livejournal.com]

On a fairly recent Halloween, it hit me that a great deal of the music available was played by people who are now dead. Which led to the thought that it would make a cool Halloween theme to only play music where the composer and all the performers are dead.

[cantkeepsilent.livejournal.com]

I think I would want to be a parent if I could be as good at it as you are.

[kightp.livejournal.com]

I don't know what inspired her to do it, but at some point when I was little my mother began exposing me to the concept of "ancestors" - all those generations of interesting people who had lived - and died - a long time ago so that I could be born and become me.

I clearly remember her taking me to visit an old family cemetery in North Texas and leaving flowers to thank my ancestors - including my great-grandmother, who raised her - for having lived.

Somewhere in there, I picked up the idea that death is the way the world makes room for new people (like me!). And also the notion of honoring those who came before. I think it helped me not be quite so sad when people in my childhood died. I suspect those talks also laid the groundwork for my understanding of inheritance, evolution and change.

I sometimes think my (raised Southern Baptist, converted Catholic) mother had a bit of the pagan in her soul.

[hobbitbabe.livejournal.com]

That's a great framework. Wherever that truth came from, I can see that working well.

[nelc.livejournal.com]

I don't know that it would do much good to try toexplain that everybody dies; isn't it something that we all need to work out for ourselves?

[papersky.livejournal.com]

A little while ago I was simultaneously reading Halting State and a book about Renaissance Florence, and I had a dream that I was writing a Tor article about Charlie Stross and mentioning how he was a descendent of the Strozzi (a real Florentine family) and noting that "in fact, everyone who is now alive had ancestors who were alive during the fourteenth century!"

Which is true, but...

The significant thing about those people, Laura Ingalls Wilder and Grandma Nancy (my Grandma was called Nancy too!) and the Strozzi is not that they are now dead, but that they were once alive.

[mouseman.livejournal.com]

I vaguely remember the day when I realized really and truly that I too would some day die. It seemed so obvious all of a sudden. I shivered for a while.

Who was it? Robert Frost?
Nothing gold can stay.

Other truths

[hazelchaz]

And this is not the sort of thing I tend to think about, until I suddenly find myself saddled with the responsibility of explaining it.

Lather, rinse, repeat. I think that sentiment is going to crop up again from time to time...