I miss him, too.
The other night, Johnny asked what he would do when we’re both gone. How would he learn new things? Where would he go?
I said I didn’t know but that there are a lot of places to still learn things. I told him he can look things up and find people who can teach him things and that he would still be able to figure things out.
He said that he would be 35 and go to the car museum. (Probably because we had just visited the car museum last weekend for something to do.) But he might not remember where it is when he’s that old, so he would draw a map to it. Then he would come back here, back home.
He asked what then would he do?
I said I don’t know but that he’d always be welcome here. He’d find his way. That’s what you do as an adult.
I think about all the times he plays with cars on his car mat his grandmother painted for his father. He asks if the cars are really loud as he vrooom oooms across the streets. He says he wants a loud car when he’s older, and it’s usually a Ford Ranger like his dad’s.
But for now, he’s only four. Any time we’re walking on the sidewalk, well, me walking and him riding his balance bike, he covers his ears no matter where he is when he hears a loud car coming. Motorcycles are the worst. I try to reassure him that it’s okay, that the loud noises startle me too and that they’ll pass, and then we keep walking.
He’ll sometimes pretend a baby is walking with his mom on the car mat and needs to cover his ears because of a loud car. Sometimes the cars aren’t too loud, and the baby is okay. Sometimes the baby is crying.
I know I can’t keep him here forever. He already runs faster than any of us and will eventually go out shining into the world with all our successes and mistakes intact. He will go out and make his own and maybe someday have that loud car that doesn’t make him want to cover his ears when he’s speeding down the street.
I hope it doesn’t break him. I hope I’m doing enough. I don’t know anything. There are no guarantees other than I won’t be here to see all of it. So much of life is fleeting and shorter in ways we don‘t want it to be. We fight over things that feel important at the time and stupid the next with enough time and space, and this is all meaningless if you don’t stop and see what’s in front of you every once in a while.
I hope he’s older than 35. I’m 40ish and looking at the possibility of losing my father. A not if but when situation, in the way that death comes for us all but sooner still than we are ready for. No matter the age or how much time you’ve had or really how close you are over the course of a lifetime. None of this is a surprise and yet you get to wonder what will take you first. Who will go first even. My mother turned and said to someone recently that it’s always the caregivers that go first.
What a comforting thought. My own granda died unexpectedly when I was ten or eleven. Unexpectedly because even though my dad’s parents were both pushing 80 at that point, my granny was the one who kept having strokes and was in and out of the hospital. I remember my dad coming into the living room and sitting down on the easy chair with his elbows on his knees. He had to be approaching 50 at that point. I asked him what was wrong, and after a bit in a very soft voice, I was the first one he told.
I remember my mother’s dad in the hospital, hooked up to endless tubes and oxygen. Laying there helpless, and somehow, at eight, I was the only one there to see him with my mom. I couldn’t hear violins for a long time without crying or set foot in a hospital without that dread seeping into my bones.
I could go on, about my granny years later not remembering who I was after another stroke years later in the hospital. Or how my Uncle John who our son is named after visited us after he had a resurgence of cancer and it was the last time we saw him before his open casket funeral, where they left a dab of shaving cream on his face and a bird flew into the church with his casket and didn’t leave until his casket did. Or any of the losses and how they would be six and five and five this year.
There are so many things that could happen, and I don’t know what any of them are or when they will happen. I don’t have control over them. I can’t fix them or make them anything other than what they are or will be.
We come back to a four-year-old’s questions. We do the best we can in the moment, even if the answers involve a future we don’t know. Trying to be honest even if the outlook is hazy. Covering our ears if the car is too loud. Just for a moment. Before it passes and is gone.