Broaching the subject of death. Tit. Pants.

Yesterday, Scouty had some questions about my grandma and where she went, because she is dead. She wanted to know if we would ever see her again. If she was sad. If we were all going to die, someday. I told her the best I could. Slightly panicked and feeling weirdly like the subject of death is even harder than the subject of where babies come from, I told her, "She lived for a long long long time and she saw everything in the world she was supposed to see. She was so old that her grandchildren were having kids and her body was tired."

"Didn't she eat enough healthy foods and get enough rest?" Scouty asked me.

"She did those things," I said. "It's just that when you live for so long that you've seen everything you're supposed to see, it's just time to die. And when you die, you become everything... the earth and the sky and the air, and you're happy. You feel all the love around you and all the love you have for everything in your life and you turn into that love."

After a few hours of thinking and questioning, (some of the questions were hard and sad like, "Am I going to be old soon? Is daddy?")... Scout decided she would like to write a letter to G.G. (Great Gram) to tell her how much she loves her. So that G.G. could feel the love better, and be able to be that love.

She and Kurt sat down together in the dining room while I washed dishes. I listened as she asked Kurt how to spell, I love you a million. He told her, "I-L-O-V-E-Y-O-U-1,000,000." She said, "How do I write from Scout?" and he told her.

Then she decided that she wanted to write some words on her own. She loves doing this. She'll spend an hour writing letters and asking me what they spell. Usually it's something incomprehensible and I just make up what her letters spell. "Um, it says doonburgblat," I'll say.

"There!" she announced to Kurt in the other room after writing for a minute. "I wrote T-I-T. What does that spell?"

"Well..." he started. "It says... tight."

"It does?" she asked, sounding suspicious of the way he turned around to look at me standing in the door way, and we both smirked in an effort not to laugh. "Well, I know something that could be tight!" she said.

"What?" daddy asked.

"Pants!" she said. "How do I write pants?"



So, in the end, our venture into the scary, carefully maneuvered topic of death ended with a letter from my almost 4 year old to my dead grandmother that says,


Dear GG,

I love you 1,000,000.

From, Scout.

Tit. Pants.





I'm not sure if this counts as having managed the topic of death really well, or not. I'm satisfied with Tit Pants, since it means I didn't start blabbering about how some people choose to be incinerated when they die, or about how Aunt Audra once presented me with a theory in Quantum Physics that said that time is only perception and everything we'll ever do in our lives is happening simultaneously, it's only our perception that moves forward.

Our girls are getting older and the questions are getting harder to answer, but I think we're all doing just fine.

I promise to keep growing with you, until you fit into those boots, Scouty. And I also promise that you're not going to be old for a long, long time.



PS. Day #1 of Operation No Sugar has been going well, so far. Banana, berry and spinach smoothie this morning and absolutely no chocolate.