Jun 23 2008
Yikes! The Fear of Death Conversation
My nine year old daughter has been brooding. She is by definition a brooder. She is the one of my children who is and I expect always will be an enigma. I suspect she is the brightest of the bunch, creative with an offbeat and sharp sense of humor her siblings so far do not possess. She’s quirky but not very good at expressing her feelings. Her older sister, my sassy teen, ok more like surly teen, often suffers from verbal diarrhea. Which is great in that I almost always know what is vexing her, she likes to broadcast it, with plenty of eye rolls for punctuation. My darling middle child does not.
So here it is 10 PM, everyone tucked in their respective beds and suddenly their is weeping coming from the girls’ room, sobs and snorts usually reserved for some kind of traumatic injury like a stubbed toe. Instead she’s crying because she’s afraid of death. I don’t have a band-aid for that one.
After extensive in the dark interviews with her, I learn that my teen had mentioned off-hand that a certain musician had died in his sleep during a casual conversation that my nine year old overhead.
People dying in their sleep can scare the crap out of anyone, but of course this tidbit set the ball rolling in her tiny little head, and she started worrying not just about not waking up but about car accidents and murderers and disease. It makes my heart hurt and my brain too. What the heck do I tell her? That I myself worry about all these things, that I pray for their safety and well being on a nightly basis, that if I really let myself dwell on all the things that could happen, I’d never get out of bed?
Nope. I hugged her and told her nothing bad would happen, that she wasn’t sick, that we would protect her, that God was watching over her, that tomorrow we’d do something fun and she would feel better. Simple words, stupidly simple. Maybe she doesn’t believe them 100%, when she came out for tissue her eyes were still wet but she was holding back the sobs and that’s something.
Tomorrow there will be distractions enough hopefully to prod her mind onto other lighter topics, milder worries. Tonight, I’m just hoping her dreams are peaceful.
