Maybe it was because I had mentioned that it was the second year since Harrison’s death, and then the next day I said aloud to myself, in his presence, that it was the fourth year since my dad’s death; Harrison’s on one day, my dad’s the next, anniversary death dates, back to back.
Perhaps that’s why my eight-year-old grandson asked me that question.
It’s not that either one of us, Eli or myself, are prone to melancholia or that we invite macabre subjects into our daily talks. No, indeed. We played outside, tossing the football back and forth until it was time for the OU football game. We were sitting on the couch together. I was amused at how well he mimicked my chants for the team.
Somewhere in there, midway through the second quarter, I said something about how much my dad loved to watch OU play football, and we talked for a minute about my dad, and then we recounted some memories of Harrison and how he was gone. Our conversation was about those two loved ones, and the memory of their lives, the one a short and the other a long life.
Gradually Eli’s questioning focused on death itself.
Talking to children about death isn’t easy. No one sat down and spoke with me about my brother’s death, though I desperately wished someone had at least tried. Death wasn’t something people talked about back then, at least not to a kid whose brother had just died in a car wreck.
The immediacy of death makes the conversation all the more difficult. When death comes like a thief in the night, as it often does, the news is harder to share and bear. The most painful talk I have ever had with two children (or anyone for that matter) was the one I had with my own when I told them their mother wasn’t coming home.
But this talk with Eli flowed naturally from the events of the week past, words he had overheard us adults sharing, as we lived the pain of grief, neither displaying it as a show nor hiding it as a secret.
And then, Eli asked me that question.
It was like something you’d read in a child development textbook, so classic it was for one his age, a child growing in his understanding of others but also typical for an eight-year-old in its egocentricity.
“PopPop,” he said, looking up to me, raising his eyebrows with a concerned look, “when you are gone, who will be around to play ball with me?”
Now, I am not the only one to play ball with the child, mind you. He’s got a dad, other relatives, and friends for that. As I write this from my second-floor study, I’m watching him below, playing ball with a friend in the front yard.
But I am the only “PopPop” to play with him; I’m the only “me” there is to toss the ball back and forth, as the two of us do. I’m the only one who pretends to be an announcer for the play-by-play in the imaginary big leagues. And so, my grandson was, unknowingly, affirming my individuality, uniqueness, specialness. He was acknowledging the power of me being “me” to him.
Sitting there on the couch, I put my arm around his neck, drew him close, rubbed the top of his head, and said, “Well, by then, Eli Benson Walls, when I’m no longer here to play ball with you, there will be someone who needs YOU to play ball with THEM.”
I know there is no one just like my grandson, and someday, someone will need him to be there for them, for he will be the only Eli Benson on earth, to do for them what no one else can do just like he does.
Someone will need him to toss the ball, back and forth, back and forth.
Just like I’ve done with him. Just like you do with someone, that something you do that is uniquely you.
One day, just like me, he too will toss the ball back and forth, back and forth, until at some point, he, like me, will toss it one last time and let it go, forever.