Serve Them Tear Soup, Kids Can Handle It

“I always sleep on the top bunk, so you can sleep down there,” she pointed to her bottom bunk. “Sounds good to me,” I said to bring calm within a room that had been attacked by toys. She curled up with her stuffed animals on her top bunk, while I moved all of her pink and lavender blankets to get into the bottom bunk.

We lay still in our bunks.

“Can you talk in heaven?” Katherine said from above. “Yes,” I said. “I think you can.”

“Is dog heaven next to human heaven?” I could picture her twirling the ear on her stuffed animal bunny above me as she pondered such honest questions. “I think it is right next door,” I answered.

The week before, I had fretted about how I might answer such questions when they came, but the answers were simple when the questions that came were so real.

A few nights later, after I had had some time to bond and hug and get to know my niece and nephews outside of the few times I saw them each year, I had my laptop idling on their living room chair. Katherine and I were sitting on the floor playing the card game Memory. She giggled after beating me two times, and then she caught out of the corner of her eye a photo that flashed on the screen from my photo screensaver. It was a group shot of Matt, me and the three kids when we had visited last spring.

She looked me right in the eye. “You know, I cried today at school because four people who are close to me died.” I could only account for two, her Grandma Wanda and Matt, but I also realized that with how heavy and sad it was in the air, I, too, felt the weight of four deaths. “I want to see more photos of us,” she said. “Okay,” I smiled. It was rare for anyone to ask to see my photos. I had to dig through the photos that I had separated out into my “Matt” folder, the folder I had created in those early days after his suicide because I couldn’t handle seeing his face pop up on my screen after my laptop lay dormant for only five minutes. I opened up the folder that held more of the photos from our time that visit and began talking openly about Matt.

“Remember this walk?” I said. “When I took all of those silly pictures of you on the swing set?” Katherine giggled. “Yeah, that was fun.” Then she did that thing that I used to do at her age, which was to ask the questions that were wiser than her years.

“Why did Matt die?”

I wasn’t totally sure of the answer to give a six year old, or the reason why he died either, and I thought of one of the last things Matt had said to me before I had left the relationship, “Promise me that you won’t ever put me into a box?” he had said. I had to tell her something other than suicide. I had to be honest, yet suicide was too young for her brain to comprehend, not to mention the nightmares it might create. So I did the best with what I could.

“Matt had a disease in his brain that made him sick.”

“What’s the disease?” she said.

“It’s called mental illness.”

As we sat back on the floor to begin our next game of Memory, I wondered if I had just put Matt in the very box that he had asked me to keep him out of.