I envy young children what is either their brief assumption of immortality, or complete disinterest in the whole question of life and death. For the first few years of their lives, death is nothing more than a fantastical abstract; something that happens to baddies in games of make-believe, not to real people. It’s an empty word that carries no weight, as hollow and alien to them as the concepts of time, space and Blippi being the most irritating man alive.
Nothing lasts forever. The state of Eden into which children are born is fragile and ephemeral, lasting only until they solve the puzzle of death at the age of around three or four. Once revealed to them, death’s truth can never be removed or reasoned with. It becomes a darkness that casts a shadow over everything that’s ever been or ever will be.
There’s a cruel joke coded into our species’ DNA, and its punchline is that none of us ever remembers our Eden; those years spent at our mother’s teat and our father’s feet, or within whatever configuration of love it was that swirled around us in those blissful, blank-slate years. As we progress through childhood our brains bulge and morph into ever-fresher, ever-larger configurations of flesh and neurons, and all memory of our lives before the idea of death became a buzzing constant in them are erased forever.
Our kids’ memories, then, like ours before them, only start to gain permanence, it seems, at the exact same moment as the hooded figure of Death first flicks open his blood-red eyes and glares at them in the whispering half-light of their imaginations. That fear, that dread, will haunt our children ever after, coming for them in the dark and quiet of their beds when their minds are unbolstered by the protective amulets of sugar and adrenaline. They’ll lie there, alone, tiny, tear-stained clusters shrouded in the endless, swallowing darkness, beneath the unseeing eyes of an empty, Godless universe.
Thanks, Death. As if bedtimes weren’t an horrific enough time for parents as it is.
The respective bedtimes of our sons, aged 4 and 2, are an exercise in contrasts: a Tale of Two Bedtimes, if you want to get Dickensian about it. While the act of getting the recalcitrant rotters into their pyjamas and into the bathroom for their pre-sleep deep-clean has always been harrowing – Benny Hill meets Nightmare on Elm Street – once in bed, Jack, the elder of the two, is usually compliant. More than that, he’s happy. It’s a sweet, peaceful and occasionally magical time, where my wife and I can bond with him over a book, and indulge in conversations from the sublime to the ridiculous; from the philosophical to the farcical. Or else, it always used to be…
Christopher, on the other hand, from the moment we flop him onto the bed, screams like a tired and emotional Weigy woman being forcibly ejected from a nightclub and into a drunk-tank. Christopher resists every tactic to coax him into unconsciousness, from nursery rhymes to gentle whispers to tender strokes of his hair. His mum usually has to bear-hug him to stop him from thrashing his way off the bed and on to the floor and the make-or-break freedom beyond. The ideal scenario is for Christopher to fall asleep unbidden in the car or on the couch well in advance of his scheduled bedtime. The only snag is that the earlier in the evening this happens, the earlier he’ll awake the next day. Peace now, with the promise of chaos later. It’s a deal we always accept. What the hell: it’s pretty much the definition of parenting.
Christopher is still very firmly in his Eden phase. Death is an ‘unknown unknown’ to him; i.e. he doesn’t know that he doesn’t know about it. Jack, on the other hand, is occasionally gripped by the cold and bony knuckles of Death, who visits him every once in a while to breathe terror and sadness into his tiny little lungs (I know that’s tautological, but I’m all about the rhythm, baby).
Last week, I was reading Jack his bedtime stories when he told me that he wasn’t feeling very well. He said that earlier that night, as we were sitting on the couch watching Doctor Who, it had felt as though his body was moving from side to side, even though he was sitting still. I asked him how he was feeling at that exact moment. Not in any pain, he said. Not feeling sick. Just strange. He said that every now and again he felt like he was on an elevator.
I canvassed Facebook for a consensus, where everyone from laymen, fellow parents, a nurse and a doctor offered a diagnosis. Labyrinthitis was the most frequent suggestion, followed by good, old-fashioned exhaustion and dehydration (it had been a very hot and humid day, and he’d had an active few hours at the park with his mum, his brother and his friends). I was worried about him, but his heart was beating at a steady pace, and he didn’t feel particularly hot or clammy. Besides, his reported symptoms seemed too mild and infrequent to be labyrinthitis… but what did I know?
We got talking about other things, and before long, with a big smile on his face, he said, ‘Now it feels like I’m on snowboard, going down a big hill.’
‘Have you been having me on about feeling strange, you wee gonk?’ I said, tickling him.
‘No,’ he said, giggling.
Though he might have been riffing now, I had no reason to doubt what he’d reported. Anyway, it was good to see him laughing. We got on to talking about his day at the park, and how fast he’d been running.
‘I’m the fastest,’ he said, ‘I’m like the Flash. Candy is faster than Chris, but I’m faster than Candy.’
Candy was our cat. We’d had to have her put to sleep last year after a short illness, the poor old girl. It’s funny, but whenever Death is on Jack’s mind, it usually rides into our conversations saddled on our old cat’s back. Right on cue:
‘I don’t want to die one day,’ he said, his eyes becoming filmy pools, ‘Even if it’s a long, long time away, when I’m really old, I don’t want to do it.’
What can you say to that? I wasn’t sure. This wasn’t our first rodeo. But I knew what I definitely couldn’t say:
‘How do you think I feel? I’m probably going to go first.’
You want to protect your kids from every threat and evil in the world, but you can’t protect them from death. There’s nothing you can do to prevent it. All you can do is prepare your children for its reality.
So how was I going to do that? And was this really the best juncture in his life at which to do it?
I knew that if I didn’t pick my words carefully I risked inflicting grave psychological trauma, and he seemed to be finding the concept of oblivion troubling enough already. I worried a little. If I said the wrong thing would I turn him into some animal-sacrificing maniac who sleeps in a coffin? Would I propel him into some weird sexual kink involving zombies?
I reached out and stroked his face. ‘You don’t have to worry about that.’
His bottom lip started quivering. ‘But I’ll have to worry about it on the last day. The last day ever.’ A few tears dropped from his eyes, which I gently smushed away. I felt like someone had stabbed me in the heart.
I remembered being around Jack’s age, perhaps a little older, and bumbling through to my sister’s bedroom, my hair wispy and wild like Boris Johnson’s, my face a crumpled mess of tears, looking for some comfort as I flailed under the anvil of death. I wanted a cuddle. I wanted a cure: some loophole mankind hadn’t yet uncovered, the secret of which was somehow held by my sister alone. I climbed into bed next to her and bubbled like a bag of gently boiling milk, weeping in the warm darkness. I don’t know what my sister said to me, or how she managed to sooth me, but it worked, because my sister became my go-to gal whenever the grim inevitability of death was weighing me down.
As a child, my mother’s go-to person when the fear of death gripped her was her big brother. He chose to allay her fears by telling her that we all had to die, because if we didn’t die, there wouldn’t be any room on earth for any new people. That always struck me as rather unsatisfactory. True, no doubt, but scant comfort; rather like receiving an eviction notice because your landlord wants to move three random strangers into your home the next day. Still, my sister is eight years older than me, and thus almost a second-tier mum. My uncle was only a handful of years older than my mother, more of a peer, and doubtless grappling with his own unease about his one-way ticket to the other side.
Whatever comfort had been offered to my relatives or my younger self, I had to find my own path with Jack. I tried again to capitalise on his anchorless concept of time, and emphasise something of its vastness.
‘If it happens,’ I said with a smile, ‘then it’ll be so, so far in the future that it’ll almost feel like forever. So what I’m saying is, in a way, you’ll live forever.’
The sniffling dropped a gear, but he was still uncertain, uneasy. Then I recalled the old cliché about laughter being the best medicine, and so decided to pour a little of the medicine onto the spoon, throw away the spoon and let him glug down the whole bottle.
‘Anyway, you won’t be scared of dying when you’re an old man. You’ll be sitting there in your big chair, and you won’t be able to walk…’
At this point I scrunched my face up into a curmudgeonly gurn, and put on a croaky, rasping, old man’s voice. “I’m sitting here in this chair, I can’t walk, and I’ve just bloody pooped myself. There’s poop all in my pants. It’s going down my leg. They’ll call me Old Mr Poop Leg. I’ve had enough of this! Bloody can’t wait to die.”
Tears were running down Jack’s face… of laughter this time. I was laughing too. Jack’s laughter is trilling and melodious, a Mexican wave that sweeps you along with it. I resumed channelling the old man, by now completely beshitted: ‘That’s the cat coming in now. It’s trying to bite my willy. It’s trying to bite my willy and I can’t move! I’m too old! I’m too old for this! It’s biting my willy and there’s poo everywhere! Ooooooh!’
Jack started freestyling a few scenarios of his own. ‘A bird,’ he said, his chest convulsing with laughter, ‘A bird flies in… and it poops in his hair, and he can’t get away, and it goes down his face like an egg.’
‘Then he poops himself again,’ he added.
Take THAT Death. I guess we can’t beat you, but we can take the piss out of you, you ridiculous son-of-a-bitch. Human laughter, human resilience. That’s the key. The power of distraction: it’s the only one of life’s problems where burying your head in the sand is the only effective strategy. What’s the alternative? Turning to serial murder? Jumping off a cliff? Drink and drugs? Better just to laugh.
The last few days started to make sense to me. We’d been talking about getting a new cat a few day’s earlier, while Jack was in the room jabbing and prodding away at a computer game. Naturally, Candy’s death had cropped up, and we’d discussed how sad and harrowing it had been. He must have absorbed every word. We’re still getting used to the fact that Jack has the ability to hear and retain information, and be affected by it. And then, in the episode of Doctor Who that we’d watched earlier that night, a few characters had been killed off, and the main baddy had allowed himself to be blown up rather than wallow in the wake of his failed plan. Jack saw it all. Death had been joining dots across the days, between a cat and a Time Lord, with a little boy in the middle.
Is that what had made Jack feel ‘strange’ on the couch and in his bed that night? A double-whammy of death?
There was no way to know for sure.
But I’ll tell you one thing: the next time the hooded harvester shows his face around here, I’m going to kosh him over the skull with a funny bone. And then Jack’s going to poo on his shoulder.
