After Such Knowledge

When our children were much younger, I once asked a good friend if she were terrified every time hers climbed into someone else's car.  Did she always think, "I might never see them again," when she kissed them good-bye?  No, she said, she never thought that.

I always did.  I always do. 

Not in what I would call a disabling way.  It's true that my boys were two years old before I permitted someone other than my husband or me to drive them anywhere, but that wasn't inconvenient for us.  And I remember the first time -- we were on vacation and my in-laws took them out for an afternoon so we could have some much-needed time to ourselves.  I did make it through the afternoon, although the fact that they were in a car with someone else made it impossible for me to enjoy myself.  The fear that had lurked beneath the surface of my psyche since the moment they were placed in my arms emerged full force that afternoon.

I adapted, though.  Life with three small children and an endless round of soccer games required to me to acknowledge, quite reasonably, that no one else was out to kill my children, and that they were as safe with other parents as other children were with me.  Which was to say, not safe at all, but what can you do?  Just yesterday my response to a friend, who had said with respect to another friend, struggling to get straight answers from an oncologist, that the doctors at that particular hospital are well-trained by their insurance and legal experts to be evasive and noncomittal, was "Oh, for crying out loud, why can't they just be upfront -- after all, he could walk out his front door and get hit by a f---ing car this afternoon!" 

Despite that terrible knowledge, or perhaps because of it, I forced myself to provide my children with what I hoped was a childhood that would convey to them a sense of the wonder and mystery and adventure of the world.  I did not want them to feel the limitations of fear.  I did not want them to feel bound to our way of life, to this neighborhood, to a small circle of expectations. 

I have not been entirely successful.  One of my children  commented a couple of years ago on how I, and they, never separate without a "Goodbye ~ I love you."  They know, without my ever having said it, that I am thinking that each good-bye could be the last one.

And I have  needed help sometimes.  When one of our sons was preparing for his long-planned year abroad immediately after 9/11, I wailed to my husband that we were complete fools, that we had no business letting him get on a plane, much less fly across the ocean.  "There's going to be a war," I said, "and there's going to be a draft, and he's going to get killed before he's 21. And that's all assuming that his plane this week isn't destroyed by terrorists."  "In that case," said my husband, "he needs this year in France now.  He might not ever get another opportunity."

I've had to accept that dichotomy as the price of living.  We must live the lives we want to live.  We might perish in the process.  We will, actually.  It would probably be easier, in some ways, to be less acutely aware of that reality.  There are, I understand from my husband, people who have the pleasure of unbroken nights of sleep on a regular basis.  (He tends to be snoring away at 3:00 a.m., while I am staring at the ceiling or roaming the house, wondering who is doing what in Chicago, or Barcelona, or North Carolina, or wherever it is that our children happen to be.)

There's a certain sense of giftedness to that same painful awareness, though.  It brings with it an attentiveness to the universe as it transforms itself, in all of its minute and passing glory.  I remember a sunrise of a few years ago that was one of the most astonishing extensions of color across the horizon I have ever seen.  I was up to see it due to a set of circumstances so excruciating that I could not imagine surviving until the end of the day -- but I was able to allow that wash of bold reds and pinks and purples and oranges to hold my eye in place.

This all emerges from a difficult confluence of events and stories.  Two days ago, as many of us are sadly aware, journaler Kat lost her sister and nephew to a terrible traffic accident.  That was how my mother and brother  died, nearly 45 years ago.  Ten years later my first stepmother, and maybe five or six years after that my aunt, died equally suddenly and unexpectedly.  For the past day I have thought repeatedly of how my stepsister, in her early 20s at the time, sat out on the porch step after her mother's death and said. "It's SO strange.  Someone is here, and then she's completely gone.  How can that be?"  And how she and her brothers looked at me and my brother, and how she said, "But you already knew that."  A combination of flat recognition and a certain degree of accusation, as though we had been harboring some terrible secret.  I guess we had.