The other night, the baby freshly asleep on my breast, my six year-old tiptoed into our room long after her not-bedtime. Dropping her math worksheet on the floor, she said, “I am confused about something.”
OK, I mouthed, pointing at the baby theatrically. (And, like, me too, girl. Confused about Many Somethings!)
“I mean, what does it even feel like to die? How do you even know if you’re dying?” She asked.
A multiple choice thought tree ensued:
A) GIRL, MATH makes me wonder that too! Are you smelling my thoughts?
B) Is this burbly indigestion the sweet n’ spicy skillet sprouts I hammered for dinner, or the first traces of malignant matrilineal pancreatic cancer? HOW CAN I TELL? WHO CAN TELL ME?
C) DON’T WAKE THE BABY BUT KEEP TALKING GO AHEAD SHHHHHH ASK ME THE UNANSWERABLE! I’m with you in this mortal coil slinky, descending the stairway from heaven.
D) Don’t let the subtraction get you down!!!
Um.
Ah.
Er.
I guess I know death probably doesn’t feel like writing about it feels.
I said something like, “Only dying people can tell us that.”
She spied a Patricia Polacco book, In Our Mothers’ House, on the bedside table, and snatched it up in a hug. “I never want to be far from this book!” She declared. Then, softly, “But how do you know when you’re going to die?”
Er.
Ah.
Um.
“Hopefully you won’t have to know that for a very long time!” I said, caught in the parenting bind between wanting to be honest, and let my children grapple with mortality, and wanting to not scare the shit out of a six year-old with four loose teeth.
Her biggest problem should be whether or not the tooth fairy has 5’s.
She added, “It’s not like I’ll die when I’m seven or anything!”
God doesn’t break the fourth wall very often, so we got no insider information. And then she leapt into our bed DO NOT WAKE THE BABY and started singing BOOM CLAP in a passionate whisper.
Girl, I agree: Song is best for all the things that are too harsh or too saccharine to handle otherwise. Too macabre, too moving, too immobilizing. Instead of a mother, now, I have melody. And she still has both.
So I decided a song is what I would post here today. To hold our mothers, our anxious questions, our subpar answers, and a serenade of the good old garden dirt in which we might recover from it all.
As you’ll see, we sang “Inch by Inch” as a family at the community musical jam in our building’s multi-purpose courtyard last weekend, my dad included— the same version the grandchildren sang at my mother’s recessional. I’m giving you the video, and you should sing along. It’s probably familiar if you have ever been to (American) kindergarten.
One of our neighbors, J Dog, is an actual opera star, and turns out he lost his mom to a swift cancer as well (ovarian). And she, too, had a green burial, very hard to come by in Tennessee. So he joined us. We sang our moms into the very air, because our missing them is an all-powerful math heist that creates something from nothing.
This past week, chasing my mom’s ghost, I got stuck in the chemo suite again. Looking out the hospital’s obnoxiously huge window at Manhattan’s East Side sky, wondering how many sick people had taken or lost heart from this view.
“Try writing shorter,” a friend advised. But my mom got the “Go Big or Go Home!” kind of cancer, so who am I haiku it?
And (step)parenting is a slog over mountains and rivers of attuned attachment and compassionate detachment. Of rupture and repair and dust-busting. I can’t always make it fit on a license plate.
When I go back in time, the details clobber me. My mom lets me take her hand again because parenting is repetitive. When I can’t stand thinking about it anymore, I throw the baby in the stroller, and walk along the East River, and sing loudly.
My mom would go to chemo with your mom’s third cousin if they needed her to, just because it was the right thing to do. She would never let someone go alone. But as things unfolded, chemo did nothing good for her.
However, song did a lot of good. It kept company in the house while she was sick, never afraid of her suffering, or her adaptive numbness. It filled even the darkest spaces. It stayed with us like an old friend (hi, Jane), the kind who refills your loose tea supply by mail to ensure you have the grief stamina to change the next diaper, or to remind your young mathematician AGAIN to carry the one (to be fair, 3 minus 9 is a ridiculous thing to ask! My own math worksheet days are firmly in my traumatic past).
In the park, the baby and I speedwalk past iterations of entrepreneurial groups holding Music Together classes on the sparse grass. For $28, you can sit closer. I’m making Music Apart, reciting lyrics to myself.
The new parents (well-dressed! You superheroes) attending on their water-repellent picnic blankets - the kind of thing I always forget— look overly enthusiastic, mirroring the enthusiasm of the lead musicians, with their tiny infants in their laps, who look very under-enthusiastic.
Maybe each of us is just oh so glad not to be alone.
When I get home, SHHHHHHHHTHEBABYISSLEEPING, my six year-old, who has not accepted the world is largely disappointing, intercepts me at the door, “Did you get any treats?”
By which she doesn’t mean a song.
“Aren’t you a bit fixated?” My 10 year-old chides her.
“Treats?” She presses.
To keep her wondering, I reach slowly into my backpack. Her smile prickles with an intense kind of anticipation.
