Death + Motherhood
My son asked me about death. Today, I am tired.
Foggy eyed. Dizzy in the head as if my head could just up and float away like a balloon. As if it’s not attached. Sleep, I would benefit from more sleep today.
Last night, a conversation began with my three year old son over dinner. Well, really it began in the car. As we were driving home, he asked what we were having for dinner tonight. Part of the answer was - shrimp. For whatever reason, I’m not clear on the reason, to my son - shrimp come across as a creature that is alive. Despite him having eaten chicken legs, wings and burgers and steak and fish his entire life; shrimp have eyes and feet. I’m not sure where he recently discovered this.
As we sat down for dinner that night at our kitchen counter, my son turned to me and looked at my plate with shrimp on it. He said, “What if the shrimp crawls away?”. To which I replied, “The shrimp is dead, sweetie.”
A pause.
A gaze into space.
He looked back at me.
We made deep eye contact in silence.
Then he said, “Do you humans die?”.
In this moment, I’m looking at my son’s face, his eyes, his heartache at the realization that humans too can die.
It is my job, my role, to inform him on the realities of what it means to be human. All in a second, I struggle with wondering if a three year old is able to stomach the idea of impermanence. Is this something his newly developing brain can comprehend?
Nevertheless, I refuse to lie to my son. I use this as an opportunity to share with him the truth and my beliefs around death.
“Yes, sweetheart. Humans die, too”.
His lip quivers. He looks at me in the face as if his mind has broken into a new level of existence. A scary one. One where Mickey Mouse isn’t real and mommy could die and perhaps worse yet, he could die.
“I don’t want to die, Mama.” he says as his eyes flood with tears.
I scoop him up, and hold him close to my beating heart. My hand cupped around his tiny fuzzy head.
“Dying might seem scary, but it’s nothing to be afraid of. Nothing lasts forever. When you die, your pain ends. And the world goes on.”
“But I don’t wanna die, Mama!”
“People have all kinds of thoughts and ideas about what happens when you die. I believe, well, really, I know, that we aren’t just our body. We have something called a spirit, a soul. It’s the special part about being human. Your spirit is what makes you, you.
When your body dies, your spirit lives on and takes a new form. You might become a butterfly, a tree or another human being. In fact, I believe our spirits are meant to be together forever. Your spirit has lived before, and in this lifetime, it found me.
Your spirit went into my belly and decided I will be its mother for this lifetime. I am sure we knew each other in another lifetime, too. That’s why, when you were first born, when I looked at you, the first words I said to you were, ‘I know you.’ Because I recognized you.
In fact, I believe you, me and your father all knew each other before this life and will know each other in the next life. We have work to do together.”
A pause. An embrace. More tears, from both of us.
Suffice it to say, not much dinner was eaten by my son. I ate my two remaining shrimps with him on my lap. His gaze steady on the shrimp as I deshelled them, placed each one in my mouth and chewed.
I awoke to cries in the night, and a fuzzy headed boy snuggled with his body pressed on top of mine.
We did not sleep much last night.
A blinking cursor on a fresh blank page can be intimidating for even seasoned writers. Here are some tips from our Partnerships team on how to go about your first Substack post: