Julius put his arms around me. I was facing the other way, so I turned to him and realized he was crying.
“Dada, I’m scared of dying,” he blurted out. Now he was bawling.
I had never seen him this terrified. My 8-year-old son was staring into the abyss of death for the first time as a not-so-little kid. And the gaping uncertainty horrified him. It was early evening on Father’s Day. A sudden challenge as a father.
Julius and my 6-year-old daughter Skyla have thought about dying before, but typically we’ve discussed it in a calm, clinical way. During those conversations, I’ve talked about my belief that we go to heaven after we die. But I’m not very definitive. I’ll say to them: “I believe we’ll get to see God and our dead relatives.”
It’s not “You will go to heaven and you will see God.” The sort of fully reassuring statement that, I presume, is the kind of message that my brother-in-law, Steve, and sister-in-law, Abbie, give their kids and possibly Julius and Skyla as well.
Steve and Abbie are evangelical Christians. Steve, for example, signs his emails with this Biblical quote: “Believe and be saved.” By contrast, I’m a lapsed Catholic who stumbled into a Protestant church in recent years. My spirituality also weaves in the Gnostic gospels, yoga-class Hinduism and a tinge of Buddhism. Although my wife Rowena and I faithfully attend Old First Presbyterian Church and love our preacher there, we have our doubts about the Resurrection. With such jumbled-up beliefs, we can’t offer our kids great certainty about what happens when they die.
We had just seen Steve and Abbie in Arizona, and during the visit, Julius apparently had been singing a religious song, “Hosannah,” either picked up in Sunday school or heard at Abbie and Steve’s.
Steve then made a CD of religious music for Julius to take home. Matters of the spirit also were central to our drive back to San Francisco. We read “The Green Ghost,” a book about a girl about Julius’ age who dies after wandering too far into the forest to cut down a tree at Christmas. It is an eerie yet sweet book. The ghost, years later, helps a family avoid getting trapped in a snowstorm. Along the way, the ghost reunites with her younger-and-now-elderly sister who had been with the deceased girl the night she died. The younger sister survived because the older one wrapped her in her coat.
Soon after we arrived in our apartment, Julius put on the religious CD from Uncle Steve. It is gentle, uplifting music. That only added to my surprise when I found Julius clinging to me.
The song didn’t soothe him, at least in this moment. As spiritual music it called attention to our mortality, and Julius had a flash of just how scary that concept can be. I imagine the explanations his mother and I have given him of what happens after death suddenly seemed flimsy. Perhaps he noticed the discord between our subjective statements and the greater certainty he hears from others in his life, including Abbie and Steve. Perhaps the story of a little girl about his age dying and becoming a ghost struck him not as charming but chilling.
I should add that Julius disputes most of these theories. I later asked him what had triggered his fear that night. “I heard the word ‘dying’ in the song,” he said. He flat out rejected any influence of the Green Ghost or the way his mother and I talk about heaven compared to the way others talk about it.
Whether my grander hypotheses hold or Julius simply latched on to a lyric about dying, his reaction that night was unusual. He admitted he hadn’t felt that fearful “since he was little.” In fact, the closest parallel I have to his spontaneous terror was when he was about three years old, and we witnessed a scary police action in our neighborhood. Several cops ran from behind a community center, guns drawn, to arrest a pair of teen-age suspects. Although he was so young, Julius intuitively sensed the danger in the air. As the police officers ran by us, he burst into tears.
I heard the same panic in his voice this Father’s Day. And for a split-second, I was rattled. Julius’ fear spoke to a parental helplessness that I hate. Ultimately, my determination—no matter how fierce—to guard my children against harm has to succumb to reality. They will die one day. And trying too hard to protect them backfires in paranoia. I can find that balance between safeguarding them and sending them into the world maddeningly hard to strike.
But somehow, as Julius hugged me in tears, a healthier paternal instinct kicked in. Just as I pulled him close when he was a frightened three-year-old, I picked Julius up by the armpits and held him on my hip. He has become so big, though, that I couldn’t easily hold him up with one arm. I propped one leg up on a chair to help support his weight.
“I understand, Peanut,” I said, using a nickname dating to his infancy. I told him death is scary to me too sometimes, and repeated my belief that when we die we will be with God and relatives who’ve died before us.
Rowena also sought to soothe him and joined us in an embrace. Then Skyla climbed onto my propped up leg behind Julius. She made it a full-family hug. Whether comforted by our physical presence or our words, Julius soon calmed down.
My Father's Day duties weren’t quite done, though. I took on bedtime songs later in the evening. At Julius’ request, I sang the two kids a version of Neil Young’s “Comes a Time.” I don’t know all the words by heart, so I often conclude the song—and my overall nighttime singing routine—by repeating the phrase “comes a time” over and over and over. Julius once told me he finds this relaxing, and he explicitly requested the ritual this evening.
So I granted his wish. And the recurring refrain seemed a fitting response to his earlier fear. Comes a time. Honest about the reality of death, but comforting at the same time. The very repetition of the phrase – the predictability – counteracting the utter unknown-ness of dying. In the face of a scary, solitary ending, a reminder that he is not alone.
Julius had thrown his arms around me, and I was hugging him back with a song.
