A little crack in a little heart

Last night, our routine was unroutinely interrupted. On most nights, Drew and I read with Tucker, then with Connor, then just the two of us together in his room. Some nights, Tucker is already asleep by the time baths are complete, like last night. So into Connor's room we went to read his library book from school, named "Harry the Dirty Dog". We've read this book 5 times already, once each night (one night Connor was asleep, so we just read in Drew's room). I don't remember this book from my childhood, but it's obviously old enough that I could have read it as a small one. In the book, Harry, a white dog with black spots, hears the bath running and doesn't want to be bathed, so he buries the scrubbing brush and runs away from home for the day to play around town. During the course of the day, he gets so dirty, he becomes a black dog with white spots. Drew thinks this is very funny. At the end of the day, he goes back home and the family wonders who the new dog is, and where their Harry has gotten off to. Well, he does his tricks to show them that he's Harry, including "playing dead".

Last night, Drew stopped me on that page, saying, "What's that?"
"What, honey?" I hedged, dreading the worst.
"What's dead?" he replied. I have arrived unexpectedly at...the worst.
"Huh. Well, that's hard to explain," I said, my mind spinning as I tried to find an easy, non-upsetting explanation of `dead'. Guess what? I came up emtpy. So I plowed on, "Well, dead is when you aren't alive any more. Right now, you and Mommy and Connor and Daddy and Tucker, we're all alive and we get to be together and play together. When you are dead, you don't get to play or be with someone any more." He sat there, a stoic expression on his face, and looked at me very hard. I waited a minute, collected myself, and said, "Are you okay, honey? Do you want to ask Mommy something?" He said no. I asked if we should keep reading. He said yes. We finished the book, and said good-night to Connor.

When I was about to tuck him in, the waterworks started, but he couldn't tell me what was making him cry. I am SURE it was the conversation we had about what "dead" is. The fact is, it's likely Drew and Tucker will learn about dead earlier than some of their compatriots. Actually, what's likely is that I will feel a compulsion to prepare them for death, since it's entirely possible that Connor will not live as long as I do. This has fostered in me a desperate desire to keep them from knowing about death. My preferred language has been to use "not alive" in place of "dead" - sure, it's a hairsplit but one that made me more comfortable.

This morning, Drew woke up upset still. In a way, I hate that I was a party to the first hard thing he tried to learn. He's a very emotional young boy and I don't want to encourage him to tamp down those emotions. Genetically speaking, he's a little hosed. I am surprisingly sentimental, and Lee is at times hyperbolically emotional.

At the same time, I would have hated myself if I wasn't there with him for his first major emotional lesson. I want him to know every day that we will always be there together.