It’s high midsummer and the sun has come back from her vacation in Seattle, or wherever she went while New England suffered the wettest, dimmest June on record.  The pool water is finally warming up and blue-lipped kids can stop shivering on the side, protesting their swim lessons.  Past the Solstice, past July 4th, the season seems to pick up speed, hurtling headlong towards August and the final glory of Labor Day.

I remember the first hot days of May when the whole summer stretched before me like a promise.  What bliss to dress my children in only sundresses and Crocs!  How grateful I was for the warm lazy weather that expanded our world exponentially, from inside games to adventures out in the green yard, where the long light pushed bedtime later and later and it didn’t seem to matter.

But summer is bittersweet in my family.  It brings in close succession the anniversary of my father’s death and my two children’s birthdays.  My oldest turns 4 in late August, and as a three year-old she has alternated between regression and mastery–wanting to be a baby again, to be held, carried, even nursed, yet craving the satisfaction of new skills and experiences.

Meanwhile she is learning that human life is linear.  Looking at a newborn picture of herself, she does a twirling fairy dance and asks, “Am I growing?” 

“Yes,” I say. 

Then she asks, “Are you growing?”  

“Not really,” I say. 

She looks forlorn, so I scramble for another answer–”I’m growing in love and wisdom.”  While I hope this is true, the cynic in my head whispers– no, you’re aging, only growing older.

One evening we walk past the old cemetery behind our house, playing chase down the dirt road.  My wild toddler takes off among the tombstones and her sister follows.  “Don’t run in there!” I warn, but I may as well be shouting at the squirrels in the trees.  My girls jump gleefully on a row of small gravestones embedded in the grass.  It’s a kind of macabre hopscotch, and I entreat them, then order them, to return to the road.  I’m not sure why I’m so upset–what do they know or care about respecting the dead?  I should practice my best parenting tricks, distract them or offer a cookie reward for racing straight back home. 

Instead I blurt out, “Stop it this instant!  There are people buried under there.”  My preschooler looks at me in astonishment and her face crumples into tears.  For the next two hours, she is inconsolable as I try to explain that not everyone gets buried, that our spirits don’t die, that the earth is a safe place for people’s bodies, a kind of bed–it’s where the flowers go for the winter. 

But nothing I say reassures her.  In her 4-year-old version of reincarnation, she imagines dying as a sequence of Let’s Pretend.  “First we’ll come back as deer, then mermaids, then fairies, then bunnies,” she often says.  After our cemetery walk, she repeats through her sobs, “But I want to be a deer!”  Eventually I stop talking and simply hold her, remembering the advice to not give young children more information than they need. 

Children don’t master abstract thinking until age 7 or 8, so everything I say about death is concrete for my daughter. The dead robin on the garden path, a victim of our predatory cats?  It looks like it’s sleeping, and we make it a little bed of dried leaves and grass.   As her birthday month approaches, she talks more about her babyhood; she wants to see pictures, and then cries because I’ve given away the baby play-tent with its dangling bees and butterflies that once fixated her infant gaze.

Meanwhile summer races by, its succession of berries reminding me of my father.  The black raspberries were ripe the week after he died.  The wild blueberries were tiny sweet gems on the summit of Black Mountain, just as they are now.  I’m acutely aware of the passing of time.  We’re moving out of the Baby Cave, into the grace period of middle childhood, towards the turmoil of adolescence– and in a split-second I can fast-forward to my girls at 18 and 20, suddenly young women.

Through the all-consuming years of baby-raising, I’ve barely considered that my offspring will grow up.  Life with young children is so intense and immediate, it can keep you rooted in the present, for better or for worse.  Boston Globe parenting columnist Irene Sege writes:  “As powerful as childhood is, whether our children’s or our own, the fact is that, God willing, most of the child-parent relationship occurs when all parties are adults.”

These words reverberate as I realize that my oldest will turn 4—Four!— and that my father has been gone for 4 years.  Where have four years gone?  They feel both brief and eternal.  Sometimes I see my father in the red-tailed hawk, circling the thermals high above our house.  A part of him watches the grandchildren he never knew in life, splashing naked in the sprinkler, fighting, playing, laughing, crying, making messes, refusing to take naps.  Savor it, savor it, I tell myself.  Here we are.  Right here.  Now.

 

 

 

 

 

 

*Originally published in the Brattleboro Reformer, July 25 2009.

Tags:   children · death · growing up7 Comments