Every visit to the doctor, now, brings bad news. In the early days, there were reassurances and messages of hope – some boys make it out of their teens, there are ways to slow the deterioration of his muscles, he might stay mobile for a long time, he might still get to enjoy some of his boyhood in the ways that other boys take for granted – but now, there are only somber descriptions of what will happen next, of what needs to be done to make things easier, of what use can be made of his diminishing time.

They want to put rods in his spine, she tells me. So that he can stay upright for a bit longer.

Rods in his spine. He won’t be able to bend, I think, before remembering, he cannot bend now. Not in the real, active sense of bending, anyway: he slumps, he droops, he slides forward in his chair, unable to hold his own weight even while sitting, a Pinocchio without strings. His spine is collapsing under the weight of his body, his muscles having deteriorated beyond the point where they can provide any support. He’s like a doll now, a puppet. But he has no strings by which he might be pulled up. He has no Blue Fairy to wave a wand and make such strings unnecessary. He has only surgeons, and rods.

Rods in his spine. I imagine steel, or rebar, those skinny ridged bars that are laid in concrete, because even concrete isn’t all that strong, even concrete needs extra support, and what are muscles compared to concrete? Even concrete sags, to say nothing of wood and fiber and the things of which dolls and puppets are made, to say nothing of people, made of flesh, made of muscle. This is not reassuring. This does not make me feel better. Muscles, concrete, steel, wood, puppets… this is a grim fairy tale.

I focus on the rods, of course, because they are so visual, so visceral, so evocative of things that are monstrous (Dr Frankenstein and his wires and bits) and things that technological (”we can rebuild him“) and things that are magical (Pinocchio’s stiff, wood-rod arms and legs, made flesh, made malleable, with one wave of a fairy’s wand). I focus on the rods, because they unnerve me, and because they are, in a twisted way, a symbol of some elusive hope. They will hold him up. They will support him. They will be his backbone, now that his God-given backbone has collapsed. They will defy God. They will hold him up, now that God is letting go.

******

His heart is going, too. They have him on medication, the kind of medication that they give to grown-up men, to men who have had heart attacks, to men who fall like thick trees, clutching their chests, lives flashing before their eyes. He is just a boy, and yet his heart is weakening, slowing, limping under the weight of years that he will never see.

I am trying to not think about that, because there are no rods for the heart.

******

The thing about the rods is, they represent, right now, everything that we worry we don’t have, everything that we worry we can’t give. Tanner’s body is failing and growing all at once; he becomes heavier and weaker, weaker and heavier, every day, and my sister struggles, alone, to care for him. To lift him is to lift limp bulk. Dead weight. Dead weight. She can’t do it alone. (What if he can’t die at home? — That can’t happen — But what if? — It can’t — What if?) She tries and she tries, but she is no Blue Fairy, she has no magic wand, only her arms and her back and her determination, and she fights with these, she fights through these, to lift her growing dying boy, and she is getting tired.

My heart breaks for her. My heart breaks for her, across and through and up and down and sometimes I worry that the pieces will shatter such that I won’t be able to put them back together and then where will I be, where will she be? There are no rods for the heart, but sisters can be rods, and I am trying to be hers.

It’s hard. I am not made of steel. And who wants to be, really? We want to be flesh and bone and blood and muscle. Our weakness makes us human. It is because of that weakness that we feel, that we ache, that we thrill. Pinocchio wanted that. Pinocchio did not want the wood, the strings. Pinocchio wanted to be real. Pinocchio yearned to be real.

We are real. Tanner is real. No amount of rods or heart medications or mobility devices can change that, but that means, too, that none of those things will save him.

Being real is precious, but it is sometimes hard to bear.

*******

I say there are no fairies, but that is not quite true, because so many are coming forward to help, to wave magic wands, wands that can’t give Tanner back his muscles, but wands that might give him, give us, strings. Please support these efforts, if you can – they’re outlined on my Tanner page, here, below his life list. (You can also follow updates on what’s happening by following the #TutusForTanner Twitter stream.) We need this magic. We really do.

And if you’re going to be in New York next week – or even if you’re not – will you wear a tutu? (FAQs on tutus at the bottom of this page.) It would be awesome if you would. I’ll be wearing mine all week. I might not be a fairy, but I can certainly do my damnedest to look like one.

It is, of course, our greatest fear. It is the bogeyman in our closet, the monster under our bed. It is the shadow that lurks behind every tree in the wood, it is the crackle of every twig, it is the sudden silencing of birds, the darkening of the sky, the unexpected chill in the air, the thing that stops our breathing, that quickens the beat of our hearts. And we cannot tell ourselves that it isn’t there, that it is just the stuff of fairy tales and scary stories; we cannot shine the flashlight into the closet or under the bed or out toward the trees and reassure ourselves, because it is out there, it is, maybe just as a possibility, maybe just as the faintest possibility, but that possibility is what gives it air to breath and matter to take form.

We could lose our children. Some harm could come to them. They could be erased from the landscape of our lives and our hearts could, would, break, shatter into a million, billion, trillion pieces and we would never recover, not really.

My heart stopped when I saw Heather Armstrong’s tweet that Katie Granju – who I don’t know personally, but admire and respect from afar – had lost her son. Suddenly. Unexpectedly. My heart stopped, and when it started again, it beat with a different rhythm and I thought, it is not possible to go through that, it is not possible; one cannot survive, one simply cannot.

One’s heart would stop beating, would it not? How could it not?

It wouldn’t – it doesn’t – of course. The heart does, as the song insists, go on, even after the worst griefs. It restitches itself, it mends, it requires none of the king’s horses and none of the king’s men, just time and love and, I imagine, faith. But it always remains scarred. It is transformed.

My family is losing a child. You know this story. It is a slow loss. The ticking of the clock has been louder, faster, of late, but still: the loss will not be sudden. It will not be unexpected. We have watched its approach for a long time now. We see it coming. This monster is not under our beds or in our closets or in the woods. It stands in the corner, in plain view, tapping its feet. We have come to know it. Knowing it does not make it any less terrifying. I have wondered, sometimes, whether it would be better to not see the monster, to not know. My sister and I talk about this, a lot. It’s better to know, she says. It changes your heart in advance; it strengthens it, readies it. It teaches you lessons, the monster. You cannot ignore those lessons.

You hug your children more.

There are days when I question this, when my own grief about Tanner and my sorrow for my sister become overwhelming. When I’m forced to confront questions about life and death and heaven and love and the soul. When the monster is too hard to ignore. Don’t ignore it, my sister says. Accept it.

I can’t, I can’t. I look at Katie, suddenly facing the monster, and my heart shudders in terror, and I know, I know deep in my bones, that when the monster steps forward for Tanner, I will curl up in a ball and shove my fingers in my ears and sing LA LA LA LA and I will deny it, deny it, just like I did when it came for my dad, just like I still do when I think of my dad, and I will not be able to look up, I will not be able to move, I will not be able to help. I am ashamed, knowing this. I am so ashamed. I am struggling to get past it, but today, I am failing.

It remains, as always, to say the usual things: hug your children. Hug them hard. Hug everyone you love. Know that you will lose them, or that they will lose you, and conduct yourself accordingly. Acknowledge the monster. Let your fear drive you to greater love. Let love be your soul-armor. Trust it to protect you.

Even though you live in doubt, trust it. It’s all you can do.

(You can find out about helping the Granju family through this terrible, terrible time over here. Please consider doing so. And then hug your children, again.)

This – the post below – is something that I wrote a few years ago, when I was still in the first joyous and anxious flush of new motherhood. It’s one of my very favourite posts, although one that has gotten buried in the sands of Wordpress, and time. It’s also a post that I’ve been thinking about a lot, not least because of my sister’s ongoing struggle with the prospect of saying goodbye to her son (a struggle that extends to all of us), but also because of my father’s passing, and my keen awareness, in the long process of letting him go, of how difficult he found it to let me and my sister (and, in a completely different context, my mother) go, of how difficult he found it to let anything go. And then, last night, I saw a film (about which I will write more at length, once I can do so without crying) that touched all these nerves, and more, and reminded me that what I thought was a unique experience of motherhood is, in fact, an experience of parenthood, one that fathers share no less for being fathers. And that, perhaps, it is an experience of love generally – of the necessity of giving love air to breathe, of the inextricability of loss from love, of the impossibility of holding on to those we love too tightly – of the undesirability of holding on too tightly – of the inevitability of goodbye. So I am revisiting it here. I am not sure, yet, what I have learned from revisiting it. Other than, maybe, that I need to meditate more upon the cruelty and beauty and necessity of letting go.

*****

One of the most difficult things about pregnancy, for me, was that it forced me to confront myself as a biological creature. It forced me to experience myself as a body, as a being put entirely into the service of nature. My every wakeful – and not so wakeful – moment was spent in a state of hyper-consciousness about my physicality: I was nurturing a life, and that life depended upon my physical being, and no force of intellect or imagination could alter or facilitate or intercede in that dependency. And as a person who had spent all of her conscious years in her head – and someone who was well-trained in a school of philosophical thought that emphasizes the absolute primacy of mind over body, reason over appetite and base sense – this was very, very hard for me.

So I was anxious – anxious beyond measure – about birth and new motherhood, which I perceived as a broadening and deepening of this experience. I didn’t fear it, exactly: I wanted the experience. Every fibre of my physical being strained toward this experience, and demanded that my mind follow – this, in itself, was disconcerting. The thing of it was, rather, that I doubted my ability to stay the course: how would I ever, ever find my way through this dense thicket, this overwhelming jungle, without maps, without books, without the compass of my intellect? How would I survive, if I had only the thrum of my senses to guide me?

I learned, of course. This education came with difficulty: I spent weeks, months, trying to beat back heavy, fear-dampened branches with dog-eared tomes of advice on navigating the brave new world of motherhood (tomes written, no less, by only the most theoretical of explorers, explorers – men – who had only scanned this landscape through spyglasses, safe on their ships, far from these strange shores), only to discover that while these might force the branches back for a moment, it would only be for a moment, before the branches would lash back and knock me off my feet.

I put the books away. I put the books away and set about listening to the thrum of my senses, and discovered, slowly, that doing what felt right kept me on the clearest course. I navigated my way (with no small assistance from others lost in the same wood, shouting encouragement and direction) through breastfeeding and swaddling and sleep and sleep and sleep and crying-it-out and the first signs of spiritedness, guided by my senses and by the gentle prodding of the sympathetic hands of fellow travelers. I found my way. And now, even when I lose my way, which I still do, I know to trust myself and the kindness of fellows in finding my way back. I know what to do.

The knowledge came, however, in more than the form of a sense of direction. I came to know the the unparalleled joy of allowing myself to embrace my biology, my physicality – and the unparalleled bliss that comes with bonding oneself with, binding oneself to, another creature, and having that creature be bound to you, so tightly, so deeply, that you are really are as one, one physical being, with one bonded heart and one bonded soul. We know something of this bond in love, in erotic love, but only ever fleetingly, in the sweet interstices of romantic companionship; we are never fully, physically bound to our other, no matter what we think Plato might have said, through Socrates, about our souls’ other halves – we are complete souls, we adult beings, and although our greatest happinesses come with allowing our souls to join hands with others, we never merge souls, not really.

Except, that is, when we have a baby. Then we know – if only for a moment, for one long, sweet moment – what it is to be more than one, to be one plus, to have split open and spilled out our blood and our viscera and our spirit and gathered it all back up again in our arms and held it, tight, pressed it to our chests, felt it throbbing and squirming and to have known, to know, what it is to hold one’s soul in one’s arms.

And then to have it pulled away. Because this is what is inevitable, this is what the books can’t tell you, this what no mother can escape: from the moment your child, your soul, is handed to you, whether that child has been pulled from your gut or yanked out from between your legs or flown from across the sea, whether your soul comes to you in gore or wrapped in white cotton sheets, your possession of it – of him, of her – is temporary. Mind-spinningly temporary. Every second, every heartbeat, that passes from the moment you clutch your second soul, your little soul, in your arms, takes that soul away from you. Every moment is a moment of growth, and every moment of growth loosens your grip. And you must keep holding, you must keep your arms outstretched, but you can’t, you mustn’t, fight to hold on.

This, then, is the art of motherhood, and it is not an art of the mind: to hold on and let go, at the same time.

We are constantly letting go: when they are pulled from our arms for the first time, when they stretch out their arms to someone else for the first time, when they first say no. When they first push themselves out of our arms, when they crawl, when they walk, little feet carrying them away. When they wean. When they wave bye-bye without shedding a tear. When they fall down and they hurt and turn to someone else for comfort. When they grow, when they live – with every step that they take they are moving away from us. And it is our task to navigate this ongoing, this infinite, this inevitable, this necessary separation with love and with grace.

But once you have learned to know with your body – to have reached far, far beyond carnal knowledge and the intoxicating wisdom of the flesh – to know, fully, what it is to be a body with a soul threaded, literally and figuratively, to its heart, a soul that can give birth to itself, take form, be held oh so tightly and then let go – once you have this knowledge, you are, truly, naked, vulnerable, exposed, open to untold hurts, to infinite pains, to the unshakeable awareness of loss. This is knowledge, and this knowledge thrills, and stings.

So it is that we mothers are ever walking out of the Garden, cursing and praising the heavens, grasping at roses, pricking our heels on thorns.

So it is that we all of us are ever walking out of the Garden, cursing and praising the heavens, grasping at roses, pricking our heels on thorns.

There’s a home for the elderly that Emilia and Jasper and I pass every day on our walks to and from preschool and junior kindergarten and ballet lessons and karate. Emilia calls the ladies who live there her ladies – “we need to wave to my ladies, Mommy!” -  and she waves and blows kisses to them when we see them sitting in their enclosed verandah, and, when they come out outside for their daily constitutionals, she stops for chats and hugs. They give her extra candy at Halloween. She thinks that they’re awesome. “Just like Grandma, only not so far away and also they give me candy instead of cake.” Which is an important difference, you know.

The other day, after passing her ladies and dispensing the requisite waves and kisses, Emilia asked this: “why are some grandmas in wheelchairs?”

“Because they’re older, sweetie, and their bodies aren’t working so well anymore, and they can’t walk as much as they used to, so they need help. Wheelchairs help them get around.”

“Are they going to die? Because their bodies aren’t working?”

“Not just yet, I don’t think. But yes, when people get much older, they’re closer to dying.”

“And when their bodies aren’t working they’re closer to dying too?”

This is what you get when death is a semi-regular topic in your household. “Yes, sweetie, when their bodies aren’t working.”

“Is Tanner going to die?”

Ah. Ugh.

“Because he’s in a wheelchair, and his body isn’t working. Is he going to die, Mommy?”

It’s moments like these that one wishes, fervently, that a meteor would blast out of the sky or a unicorn would leap out from behind a tree or that a team of nude marathoners would streak by on the street because, seriously, flapping genitals and shooting stars and beasts of myth and legend would be easier to account for than the fact that one’s child’s much-loved cousin is dying.

To say that I chose my words carefully is dramatic understatement. “He is dying, honey. Not right now, though.”

“When?”

“We don’t know.” I clutched her hand and prayed for unicorns. “We don’t know.”

“Well, when he dies I need him to take a letter to Grandpa. I’ll write one for him, too, but there’s one I need to send to Grandpa and you said that he doesn’t have a mailbox so someone needs to take it to him. Can we phone Tanner and ask him if he’ll do that?”

No unicorns appeared, no meteors blazed through the sky, no nudists ran past us in the street, and when she asked if I was crying, I said no, no, there’s just something in my eye. And then I prayed even harder for unicorns.

******

I sent a letter with my dad when he died. I wrote a letter to him, and asked the funeral director to lay it upon his body when he was cremated. I said secret things, loving things; I gave thanks; I made promises. And I asked him if he wouldn’t mind delivering another letter, a letter to my Grandma, a letter that I had written many, many years before, when she died, and that I had asked him to give to her, a letter that I found, after he died, in one of his secret boxes of letters, a letter that he had kept alongside his suicide notes, a letter that, I think, reminded him of how powerful love and how powerful life and how powerful death and that kept him from fulfilling the his suicide wishes and that kept him tethered to life, and the joy of life, whenever such joy was faint. I asked the funeral director to place that letter upon his body, too, so that he might deliver it to her, because I knew that he’d always intended to, and that he’d be glad.

And so those letters burned with my father’s body, and that they did provided me – still provides me – with some comfort. And him too, I think. I hope.

So. I understand why Emilia wants to write him a letter. I know why she wants Tanner to deliver it. My heart weeps, knowing this.

******

We don’t really talk to Tanner about death, or at least, not about the fact that he’s dying. When my father died, we stumbled around the subject, struggling to frame it in the most positive terms – Grandpa had a good life, Grandpa was so loved, Grandpa will always be with us in our hearts – and to balance the sadness with joy – it’s okay to be sad, because we miss him, but we’re sad because we still love him and will always love him and love never dies and that’s good. That’s good! We threw a birthday party – at the lake, on the beach – for him, in lieu of a memorial, so that there could be balloons and cake and candles, so that the kids, and Tanner especially, would experience the occasion as joyous rather sad, a celebration rather than a goodbye. We called it his last birthday, and Emilia and Jasper and Sophie and Tanner loved it, and even though the wheels of Tanner’s chair got stuck in the sand and seagulls stole some of his cake, he declared it a good day. “This was a good day,” he said, and we all agreed. We saved our tears for later.

My mom and discussed at length whether we were wrong to try to contain some of our sadness about Dad’s death in front of Tanner. Wouldn’t we do better, I wondered, to be honest? To let him know that it’s okay to hurt, to be sad about death? So that he knows, when the time comes, that we’ll be hurt and sad for him? My mom disagreed. He knows we’re sad. But he doesn’t need see us in the full bloom of pain.

We still don’t know how to navigate this, this narrow valley between the joy of life and the fear of death, this valley that gets narrower and narrower the further we walk. How do we openly exult in the sunlight without acknowledging the shadows? How do we make plain how precious is each day without acknowledging that we are counting those days? How does one talk about death with a child who is dying? How does one talk about a child dying to the children that love him?

How does one prepare them for the letters?

Emilia cannot make her phone call, of course. We are not making preparations for Tanner’s death, except for all of the ways that we are, all of the ways that we prefer to think of as life, as living, as seizing the days, and so now is not the time. I don’t know that there will be ever be such a time, although perhaps there should be, perhaps there needs to be, and perhaps this angst is just my soul recoiling against what this all means.

I will let her write her letters, and I will save them for her, and when the time is right, maybe – sometime, when we are all holding hands and walking through the narrowing valley – she will ask Tanner to take them and he and she and we will be comforted. Maybe. Maybe.

(Hey, buddy. Why don’t you go ask your mom for some chocolate? Or cookies. Yeah. Go get some cookies, would you? Don’t make me roar. You don’t want me to roar.)

Jasper is much more blase about scary things than am I. There’s a lesson for me there, I think.

Whatever that lesson is, however, it is a lesson that I am not up for thinking about right now. Maybe tomorrow.

And then I admitted something in this post that I never thought I’d admit anywhere other than whispered, private conversations…

… and I’m still pretty sure that I’m not nearly as brave as I need to be. Want to be. Need to be. Because I kind of want to take it back, even though I don’t think I should, even though I know that I shouldn’t, even though I know that it’s better – for me, for the people I love – that I don’t. But still.

But still.

Here’s the thing: sometimes, when you drag ugly or frightening things into the light, the brightness of that light reveals those things to be smaller or less imposing or less threatening or less hideous than you’d thought when they’d been tucked away in the dark or lurking in your closet or under your bed or wherever it is that you lock away your bad things. Sometimes, when you drag scary things into the sunlight, whatever it was that made them scary alights into flame and then dissolves into ash and you are just left with – what? – words, images, memories, the pale outline of whatever it was that was so frightening, a shadow on the ground.

This is why sharing our stories is good. This is why, too, sometimes, exposing those things that hurt us or that might hurt us if we let them lurk in the dark and become frightening is also good. It’s not something for every day – we don’t want to spend all of our well-lit hours poking in the dark – but it is something, something that we need to remind ourselves that we can do, that it’s okay to do, that sometimes is necessary to do.

I am so grateful that you all support me so warmly in this space, and give me the courage to expose my scary things to light. Thank you.

(For a different look at what beauty light – and a good camera, and a gifted artist – can bring, see the work of the divine Ms. Chookooloonks today. She made me beautiful. She’ll argue with that, of course – she did argue with that – but it’s true. She made me beautiful by seeing beauty in me and by seizing that beauty and capturing that beauty and rendering that beauty into art. Would that we all had that gift.)

This?

This makes me cry. With joy. With grief. With gratitude.

(You can join in too. I’d love it if you would. So would Tanner. Because it’s silly, and happy, and fun, and because it’s for him.)

Emilia wants to know what happens when we die. She asks a few times a week, on average, sometimes more, sometimes less, depending on whether or not we’ve spoken about my dad or about Tanner or about dinosaurs. Today, she asked because they’d been talking about the Easter story at school. She wanted to know why Jesus got to fly up into the sky, and Grandpa didn’t.

You burned him, didn’t you? she asks. How could he fly after that?

Explaining death is one thing. Explaining the cremation, the afterlife and Divine resurrection are something else entirely.

We’ve had a lot of these talks. We’ve been having them since my dad died, since she watched me collapse and shatter into a million tiny pieces and wanted to know why. They’ve been good talks, but I fear that they’ve been better for me than they have for her: she has grounded me with her questions, and given me solace with her answers. Because she has her own answers, she pulls them from the sky or the stars or the spirits or her soul and she lays them bare and shares them with me, her stories, the stories that she weaves to make sense of all this mysterious loss, this loss that I can’t explain, lapsed, struggling Catholic that I am, groping for a faith that eludes.

This is why I am failing at this: I have no answers for her. I have no answers, only wishes, only hopes, only deeply held hopes that I ache to grasp with certainty, but which remain – for me, who is grasping at that lost faith, that faith that once upon a time held answers – ephemeral, evanescent, faint. So when she asks me, where did Grandpa go, I say, I think that he went to a place called Heaven, a wonderful place full of love and light where we will someday see him again, and I cry as I say it, because I don’t know for sure, and I wish with every particle of my soul that I did know, that I could know, because I would give anything to know, anything. And she says, in the softest of voices, I know where he is. He’s in his Death House, the one that I made him, and someday we will go there.

– Oh, sweetie…

I know that you think he’s in that box, but he’s not, he’s in his house in Heaven, and we’ll go there someday, and you’ll see, and you’ll know.

And my heart expands, and breaks.

******

My friend Kate, who has known terrible loss, wrote the other day about thumb-wrestling with Death as she prepares for the death of her grandmother. She didn’t like doing it, she said, not least because he has longer thumbs, which I imagine is true. She asked her readers to not leave condolences, but, instead, memories, of their mothers, whose flour-dusted hands wiped tears and whose lipsticked mouths left kiss-marks and whose warm arms were the safest place in either earth or Heaven, so that we might reflect upon motherhood persisting against and beyond death, and I said this:

I have nightmares, about losing my mom, about losing my mom after losing my dad and being left, alone, without them, an orphan, my longest and most deeply held fear. I have nightmares, about fighting with Death, about begging him to stay away.

I’m sorry. I wanted to say something lovely, about my mom’s belly laugh and her twinkling eyes and her perverse imagination, the one that conjures alligators in closets for my daughter to hunt and her ability to bake a lemon cake, right on the spot, just because you asked. But I’ve been having nightmares.

I have been having nightmares, nightmares wherein my dad is already gone and then my mom goes too and I am left to suffer the pain of my greatest fear, the fear that drove me to sleep on their bedroom floor at night, the fear that kept me from sleepover parties and sleep-away camp, the fear of losing them, of being left alone, an orphan. When I was child, my good Catholic parents would comfort me and soothe me and brush my hair from my tear-dampened cheeks and tell me that they would never leave me and I clung to that, even as I knew it to be false, I clung to it, and when I flew west to deal with my father’s death some months ago (an eternity ago, a second ago) I sat in my seat on the plane and cried and cried and cried like the little girl that I had suddenly become again, having flashed backwards in time to that experience of knowing that it would happen and that it would hurt, bad, worse than anything else I could imagine, and then flashed forward again to discover that yes, yes, this is exactly how it feels, and it is terrible, horrible and bad.

And so now I am terrified of having the loss compounded. And I am terrified of communicating – directly or indirectly, intentionally or not – this terror to Emilia, who is too astute, who knows too well when I am sad or afraid and who knows the difference between my sadness and my fear and wants to understand them. But I don’t want her to understand them, I don’t want her to think about losing me, because I want to forestall this pain for her, even as I shudder at its inevitability.

I have nightmares. And my only solace – my lifesaver, my heartsaver, the backbone of my soul armor – is, really, my daughter and her kindergarten theology, her insistence that it will all be okay, that we will all end up at happy place, that she knows this, because we must, because it is true.

I hold her to me tightly, and weep for this, in gratitude and shame.

Are there horses in Heaven? — I don’t know; what do you think? — Did Grandpa love horses? — He did. — Then there are horses there. Someday, I will ride them.

– Me too, sweetie. Me too.

******

This post was inspired by a discussion that was shared between me and some very good friends – Lindsay, Loralee, Julie and Devra – at Mom 2.0. We curled up on the floor of the bedroom of the Four Season’s Presidential Suite during the CheeseBurgHer party and talked spirituality and faith, grief and loss, prayer and meditation and all variety of confused and confusing things. And then Lindsay decided that maybe we should explore some these questions (like the one I’m struggling with above, talking to kids about death) together, on our blogs. So we are. You’re welcome to join in. Leave me a link if you do. Or just speak your piece in the comments. Talking, maybe, will bring enlightenment. Or maybe more confusion. Either/or.

So: how do you talk to your children about death? Do you talk to your children about death? If they ask the hard questions, how do you/will you answer? Or do you, will you, like me, seek their answers, and look for comfort there?

PS: I offer another, somewhat less morose reflection on navigating the waters of loss with children over at Their Bad Mother. Because once I start talking, I can’t stop.

I don’t quite know what to say about Joannie Rochette. I’ve been stunned by her bravery, humbled by her strength, amazed by her determination in the face such terrible sadness. When my father died, it was days before I could even walk in a straight line, weeks before I could hold myself reliably upright. After losing her mother, Joannie Rochette strapped on her skates and competed for an Olympic medal. Incredible. Courageous.

It’s courageous because it represents an overcoming of a terrible grief, a grief that comes at you like a baton to the knees and the gut and the mind and the heart. It’s not a defeat of such grief – there is no defeat of such grief – but it is – it represents – a willingness and an ability to power through that grief and to keep moving, keep persevering, keep living, in spite of that grief. And more than that, perhaps: to take that grief and let it move through you in a way that carries you forward, to feel its battering force and take that force and bend it to your will and make it dance, to dance with it, to take the lead and turn the struggle into something beautiful.

I would like to do that. But I still feel, more often than not, that the grief is moving me, leading me, directing our steps. We’re dancing, I know, and it’s not always terrible (that is one grief’s secrets: that it is sometimes welcomed, that it is sometimes embraced, because the grieving soul does, sometimes, just want to give in, to fall back into the deep curve of those arms and yield to the bending and the tipping and to just let its fingers graze the floor as it sways and drops) but it is not controlled, I am not controlling it, I am just being led, and I wish, sometimes, that I were not.

Jeannie Rochette will have her moments, I know; moments in which she will no longer feel in control, when she will not be able to stand, let alone skate, because this kind of pain – no matter what anyone says – is terrible, terrible, beyond measure. But she will always have this moment of triumph, this overcoming, this demonstration of the force of life and love in the face of death. For that she should be proud. To that we should all aspire.

I do.