I often think about how fragile all of life is. One day you are a competitive triathlete, the next, bam! your foot is broken for the rest of your life. One day you wake up early to exercise, sneeze(!), and then can't move at all for weeks/months and find yourself a season and a half later wearing a compression corset and not even allowed to do laundry. Or you are driving home from work, and someone else is tired or on their phone, and all of life is over. Then there is my grandma, who has rapidly progressing dementia and was transferred to a nursing home yesterday. Once obsessively neat and somewhat over-involved to the point of nosiness, she has lost the ability even to know what to do in the bathroom or when to wake up. She will soon forget how to swallow. In her dementia she has said things I know the real Grandma would regret and has damaged the relationships with her children. My mom has lost her mother. Sooner or later, quickly or slowly, we all lose everything we think we own, everything we think we are. What you have today is a gift, and it could be gone tomorrow, or even later today. When I was a teenager, my grandpa thought I was unnecessarily dark for thinking things like this. And yes, these things are sad, but they are also true. I think such thoughts are both dark and light. I think most people could do with a bit of reverence for what they have and appreciation of the fact that it is temporary. All of it.
However, maybe my grandpa's point was that there is such a thing as taking the fragility awareness too far. My kids cried themselves to sleep last night. This is perhaps the sort of thing that bothered my grandpa. They weren't crying about my grandma, as that is almost too big for them to understand. They were crying about an eighty-five cent piece of rubber.
Adam won the coloring contest at school yesterday. He was enormously pleased. This makes two years in a row of coloring victories for him, and we take our victories where we can get them. Adam doesn't spill everything that goes on in his day like some kids do, but yesterday he came home so happy he was babbling. He did well on the Wordmasters competition, and his classmates had voted his coloring the best for the second year in a row. He gave me the blow by blow on the voting and how Heidi was a close second with only two votes less than him, how time had been called when he still had one section left to color, how someone knocked over a water bottle on his prize-winning work and how the teacher had hung it to dry and inadvertently torn a little piece of the paper in doing so. The prize was a little rubber duck in an innertube. He told me everything imaginable about this duck: how one girl had wanted to pet it because it was so cute even though it was made of rubber and who wants to pet rubber?, how it had acquired its name (Squeaks,) what the other choices had been and why he had chosen as he did. He made each of us guess the name, even after we had heard the previous guesses. He played with it all evening. He wanted it to eat dinner with him outside on the deck. I don't allow toys at the table, but he was so enamored of this duck, and it was rubber, and we were eating outside for the first time, so I said OK. Gretchen went upstairs and got a rubber duck to eat with her too. As soon as they were done eating, the kids got up and were dancing around the deck throwing their ducks in the air and catching them. Then they started to see how high they could throw them. About a minute before it happened, I thought in my head, "I hope that doesn't go on the roof." I decided that no, Adam would be smarter than that. Nope. He threw it up, and it didn't come down. He turned and caught my eye, and when my face confirmed that yes, the duck was gone, his face crumpled and he started to cry. Oh well, we told him, maybe it will come down in a hard rain. (I don't think it will.) We don't have a ladder long enough to reach the second story, and even if we did, I'm not sure we would risk climbing on the roof for a rubber duck. Life is fragile, remember.
Adam was a mess the rest of the night. Gretchen kept trying to make him feel better by fetching his other rubber ducks. (By the way, I didn't realize that Adam has a rubber duck collection, of sorts. What?) Finally Adam said he didn't want all of his toys downstairs and please stop. So she did. But she kept bringing up to Adam how sorry she was about Squeaks, how sad it was, how much she missed him too. Then Adam would start off crying again. Finally I suggested to Gretchen that she just not bring it up any more because it was making Adam sad to keep thinking about it. Then she started to cry because she had made Adam feel worse. She wouldn't stop crying either. So by the time they were in bed, both kids were sobbing, one because "I just miss Squeaks so much!" and the other because she had wanted so badly to help with the grief and had made it worse.
Sometimes it helps to move our minds away from the true tragedies to the ones we can hold in our hands (or throw on the roof.) We all went to bed last night somber at the thought of how quickly and thoroughly joy can transform into sorrow, the fullness of having into the hole of loss. We woke up to blossoms on the crab-apple tree but know that winter will come again soon enough. How fortunate for us, though, who once had grandparents who took us camping and taught us to play pool. How fortunate we went and learned when we could. How wonderful to have won the contest, how fun were those hours of victory. And how lucky for us, now, to be watched over by a little duck who reminds us to handle with care the treasures of today.
However, maybe my grandpa's point was that there is such a thing as taking the fragility awareness too far. My kids cried themselves to sleep last night. This is perhaps the sort of thing that bothered my grandpa. They weren't crying about my grandma, as that is almost too big for them to understand. They were crying about an eighty-five cent piece of rubber.
Adam won the coloring contest at school yesterday. He was enormously pleased. This makes two years in a row of coloring victories for him, and we take our victories where we can get them. Adam doesn't spill everything that goes on in his day like some kids do, but yesterday he came home so happy he was babbling. He did well on the Wordmasters competition, and his classmates had voted his coloring the best for the second year in a row. He gave me the blow by blow on the voting and how Heidi was a close second with only two votes less than him, how time had been called when he still had one section left to color, how someone knocked over a water bottle on his prize-winning work and how the teacher had hung it to dry and inadvertently torn a little piece of the paper in doing so. The prize was a little rubber duck in an innertube. He told me everything imaginable about this duck: how one girl had wanted to pet it because it was so cute even though it was made of rubber and who wants to pet rubber?, how it had acquired its name (Squeaks,) what the other choices had been and why he had chosen as he did. He made each of us guess the name, even after we had heard the previous guesses. He played with it all evening. He wanted it to eat dinner with him outside on the deck. I don't allow toys at the table, but he was so enamored of this duck, and it was rubber, and we were eating outside for the first time, so I said OK. Gretchen went upstairs and got a rubber duck to eat with her too. As soon as they were done eating, the kids got up and were dancing around the deck throwing their ducks in the air and catching them. Then they started to see how high they could throw them. About a minute before it happened, I thought in my head, "I hope that doesn't go on the roof." I decided that no, Adam would be smarter than that. Nope. He threw it up, and it didn't come down. He turned and caught my eye, and when my face confirmed that yes, the duck was gone, his face crumpled and he started to cry. Oh well, we told him, maybe it will come down in a hard rain. (I don't think it will.) We don't have a ladder long enough to reach the second story, and even if we did, I'm not sure we would risk climbing on the roof for a rubber duck. Life is fragile, remember.
Adam was a mess the rest of the night. Gretchen kept trying to make him feel better by fetching his other rubber ducks. (By the way, I didn't realize that Adam has a rubber duck collection, of sorts. What?) Finally Adam said he didn't want all of his toys downstairs and please stop. So she did. But she kept bringing up to Adam how sorry she was about Squeaks, how sad it was, how much she missed him too. Then Adam would start off crying again. Finally I suggested to Gretchen that she just not bring it up any more because it was making Adam sad to keep thinking about it. Then she started to cry because she had made Adam feel worse. She wouldn't stop crying either. So by the time they were in bed, both kids were sobbing, one because "I just miss Squeaks so much!" and the other because she had wanted so badly to help with the grief and had made it worse.
Sometimes it helps to move our minds away from the true tragedies to the ones we can hold in our hands (or throw on the roof.) We all went to bed last night somber at the thought of how quickly and thoroughly joy can transform into sorrow, the fullness of having into the hole of loss. We woke up to blossoms on the crab-apple tree but know that winter will come again soon enough. How fortunate for us, though, who once had grandparents who took us camping and taught us to play pool. How fortunate we went and learned when we could. How wonderful to have won the contest, how fun were those hours of victory. And how lucky for us, now, to be watched over by a little duck who reminds us to handle with care the treasures of today.
