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Last night, my 4.5 year-old daughter was feeling a little nervous. She found out about death, recently, and has put together the fact that her dad and I will some day die. I sat in her room with her and talked to her about it. I told her that there's so much life to live, still.
I told her that when we're old, she will still have her baby sister, and that they will always have each other to love. I told her not to worry about her whole life all at once, but just to think about the next few days. Let big people have big worries, I suggested.
I reminded her of all the fun we've still got ahead of us. So many more Christmases, Halloweens, birthdays, trips, fourths-of-Julys, snowy days, sunny days. And I told her I loved her so much, I wrote a story about how happy she has made me in a big newspaper lots of people see.
"A newspaper? Papa reads those." I said yes, I write sometimes in a very big one that goes all over the world. And I chose to write about how lovely it is that she's alive. "Will you read it to me?" I told her I would. "Will you keep it so I can read it one day?" That, too.
Here's the essay. I'll put a copy in the box where I've stashed their hospital blankets and hats, the little white shoes they were both baptized in, their sonograms, a few photographs, some letters. It's the box I'll live in, for them, long after I die. https://www.nytimes.com/2021/05/07/opinion/motherhood-baby-bust-early-parenthood.html
(Though, being a teeny tiny woman, I'm destined to live to like 115, as all extremely small nanas seem to do.)
