Wow. Three and a half years since I wrote anything on this blog. Enough time has passed that I had to do some serious searching to remember where I even had this blog set up at. Don't get me wrong, I've considered writing before this, but it's hard to comment on the inane or even infuriating events of the recent past after dedicating the last few posts to the subject of Avery and how her passing has affected and effected us. Of course this post is not going to be different.
I have a nighttime routine with Wesley that includes reading to and talking with him. It's an immense joy to hear what he is thinking and learning, and lying there in his bed together I get a real sense of his life and how he's growing. We have a small shelf of books that he picks from and he knows them well enough that on occasion he's "read" a few of them to me. But I really like talking to him. We talk about what he did at school or while I was gone the week before. We talk about upcoming plans for the weekend or vacations. We sing songs or count or talk about things we did while playing that afternoon. Two weeks ago we found a dead bumblebee out by our playset, and I tried to introduce the concept of death to him. Some of you may think it's too early, but here was my reasoning: my boys love being outside. They go outside every chance they get and I'm happy to let them be out there as long as we can. I want them to have an understanding and respect for nature then, and that includes all of the animals and plants around them. I point things out like the lilacs, tulips, peonies and daffodils that have been blooming in our yard. We watch ants and worms and the big droning carpenter bees. We watch the squirrels and birds and rabbits working around on the property. When we found the dead bumblebee I tried to explain to him that the bee was dead and that meant it couldn't fly or move anymore. It couldn't go buzzing from one flower to the next for food. But, it would now become food for other insects. I went all circle-of-life on him. He accepted it and even, unprompted, covered the bee's little body up with a few rocks. I knew this was only the first step in a lifetime of coming to terms with what death means. Tonight we took another small step.
During our pre-bedtime conversation I asked him who his brother was. Just a simple connect-the-dots query forcing him to associate. However, I followed this up by asking who his sister is. We've always told him who Avery is and that she is his sister. He can point her out in photos and name her, but I knew there was a huge difference in him being able to name Sawyer as his brother, who he plays with on a daily basis, and recalling that Avery is related to him too. He was unable to name his sister, so I reminded him. I then told him that her birthday was actually coming up soon. Wesley reminded me that HIS birthday was coming up soon too. I said that was right but that Avery's came first. He then let me know that Avery could come to his birthday and I found my head spinning at how to address this. Sure, I could have just brushed it off or given him some non-committal answer that sated his three year old's ego, but instead I found myself telling him that I wish she could be there, but that she had died. His response? "Bumbum." And again. And then again. I thought perhaps he was saying something that like so often I simply couldn't understand at first. But it was in fact the kind of cartoon sound effect that comes after something sad has happened; the stereotypical 'wah wah' of the bass. "Oh god," I thought. "I've made a mistake. He isn't ready to hear about this." Here I am with tears running down my cheeks at the memory of the loss of my daughter and he is now telling me how some imaginary thing killed her and repeating the "bumbum." I know he's tying what he's just learned from me to some schoolyard play with his friends and the games they play. I can just imagine him talking to Erin the next day and innocently telling her how *something unintelligible* killed Avery. I see her being blindsided by this and the emotional devastation that would follow. Oh god, what have I done? When I told her about the mistake I felt I had made though her response, along with some tears of her own, was that she thought it was good that he know why Avery couldn't be at his party. And, she made me promise to write a blog about it so that we could always remember this night. Perhaps I'll learn something from it for when it's time to explain things to Sawyer. Probably I'll make a mess of that too
