They conveniently left this one out of the baby books. In all my research about sleep training and how to get your toddler to stop calling for you seven bajillion times, and how to choose a preschool, and how to teach them about chores and money, it never once occurred to me that sometime soon, my innocent little daughter would learn about death and we’d be having a conversation about our finitude.
I’m taking June to the bathroom before bed, and as she sits there on the toilet, she says out of nowhere, “I don’t want to die.”
Where is this coming from? I think. She is four. In her first year of preschool—a very part-time preschool, I might add, because I couldn’t bear to send my first child away from me for more than two days a week. She is sensitive and sweet and creative and athletic. But she is four. How are we here already? Here with her learning about the finitude of life and me scrounging for the right words to discuss it.
I panic. “What did you say?” I ask innocently.
I had heard her, of course. I heard every word. I’m just buying myself a little time to figure out how to approach this unforeseen conversation.
“I don’t want to die,” she says. And then she says it a third time to make sure I heard her.
“Why do you say that?” I ask.
“I don’t want to die because I don’t want to be away from you.”
My heart sinks deep into my belly. I have an immediate and overwhelming temptation to suppress her fears with platitudes of “you’re not going to die; of course we’re going to be together forever; I would never leave you.” And in the same moment, I am flooded with thoughts of the times I’ve brushed shoulders with death. A favorite aunt who left this world too soon. A dear friend whose mom died before she, or anyone else, was ready. The tragic car accident in my twenties that took the life of a precious two-year-old. Denying the truth would only be a disservice to her and undermine her trust in me when she inevitably faces the truth: She will die someday. And so will I…
“It’s okay to feel that way,” I hear myself say.
Okay, that’s a good start, I think. Not denying that death is real while also validating her feelings about it.
We embrace as she sobs and repeats, “But I don’t want to die. I want to be with you forever.”
I feel like I’m walking a tightrope between being overly morose and overly assuring. I can’t simply dismiss her fears, brushing past the unavoidable pain of future earthly separation, pretending like it’s all okay because we go to heaven. And we do talk about heaven and God and Jesus and how, because of Jesus, we will be together in heaven. She has questions about heaven, and I have a lot of “I don’t knows.” We pray. We tell God that we have questions about heaven. We don’t ask him to answer the questions. Just tell him we have questions.
As I teach my kids to pray, I find myself straying away from prayers that ask God to do something very specific. Because in my experience, God doesn’t really answer specifically, at least not very often and not very quickly—and sometimes not very obviously. Instead, I lean on prayers of questions and conversation: Telling God how we feel; asking him questions, but not demanding answers. It feels awkward, but real. And it’s refreshing and healing for me, too—turning to God with the purpose of communion, not gratification.
Somehow, amazingly, I navigate the conversation to a place where my daughter is calm enough to head to bed. Later, I debrief the conversation with my husband and sob because our little girl is growing up, and it breaks my heart to see her face the ugliness of the world right before my eyes. I cry because I’m not sure I did the conversation justice. I was thrown a direct pass and I fumbled.
My husband reminds me that this is not a “one-time, better-get-it-right” conversation. There will be a lifetime of conversations about who God is, how we get to know him, and how to be curious in faith.
But I also cry because my daughter awakened the fear in me that I repress. Her fear is my fear. The very thing my preschooler fears the most is my deepest fear, too: That I might pass too soon, leaving the raising of my children to others—yes, the people I trust most in the world, but still completely out of my control. My children would go through their childhoods without their mother, and I would not be there to witness them growing up.
My husband and I continue to talk. We talk about how this tenderness would be a good place to meet my daughter the next time we have the “I don’t want to die” conversation. For all the hope I have in Christ, I, too, have those same fears. After all, isn’t one of our deepest human needs to not feel alone, even in our hardest feelings and fears?
Up until now, I thought I’d come to terms with death. I have a hope beyond the grave and a confidence that comes from Christ. But it’s not until now—now that I have brought three beautiful children into this world—that I realize I’m not afraid to die because I don’t trust Jesus with what comes after death for me; I’m afraid to die because I’m not sure I trust Jesus with what comes after my death for them. Yet even as I type this, tears stream down my face, and a refrain in my heart pounds, “they are yours, they are yours, they are yours.”
The next time my daughter comes to me with her fears of “I don’t want to die,” I’ll answer a little more honestly:
“It’s okay to feel that way. I feel that way, too.”
Cover photo credit: Arleen Wiese
