Soapbox

Saying Goodbye

So I’ve got this kid… and a short time ago his great-grandmother died. Pretty much the entire family tree, with all its many leaves and branches, gathered at my mother’s house for the funeral. Despite the fact that there were cousins to play with and not an excessive amount of weeping and wailing going on, Stephen still reacted quite predictably to the fact that something in his world had changed.
"I don’t want to be here." he said vehemently. " I want to go home to my house, and I don’t want to ever come back!" And finally, (for several reasons) I just put him in the car and took him home for one night.

Perhaps he was reassured by the fact that his house was still there, unchanged and waiting for him, but for whatever reason, he was quite willing to be driven back to my mother’s house the next day. He made it clear, though, that he would have nothing to do with any part of the funeral or visitation at the funeral home. His cousins could go and give her flowers if they wanted, he had no desire to see what dead looked like. With a hyper-sensitive child like him, it made good sense to me, so I agreed.

A few days later, when everything had settled down, I had a discussion with him about bodies and souls and death and my personal beliefs. Of course, as so often happens with the Boy of Science, we digressed pretty quickly into DNA and genetic "fingerprints" and the more concrete aspects of the body human. His little sister, meanwhile, drew a picture of Grandmother.
"Here she is, with puffy hair, and eyes like she is alive, so we can remember when we used to visit her." I’ll save that picture always.

A few days after that, we went camping with the cousins, and one of them found a dead caterpillar. Immediate plans were made for a funeral and burial for the little fellow. Grace sat, digging a hole with a stick while Katie held the deceased on a leaf. Grace began "preaching" in a sing-song voice, with Stephen telling her what to say.

"Well, we’re all here having a funeral for this little dead caterpillar who got drownded. Some people say that when you die, your spirit goes up to heaven, but we don’t know if that happens with caterpillars. But he was probably a good caterpillar, anyway. Sometimes things die ’cause they get old, or sometimes someone kills them, like Abraham Lincoln or Martin Luther King. But this little guy just got himself drownded in the creek. Now it’s time to put him in the ground. Goodbye: everyone say goodbye."

And so we did. It was a send-off any catterpillar would be proud to have.