I, said the fly

Death has been on our minds.

Henry sees changes in his brother and speculates about the future, about the changes in store for us all. "Are you and Daddy going to get littler and littler?" he asks."Will you be like Baby James?"
"No," I say. "We only get bigger and bigger. We won't ever be babies again."
He keeps prodding.
"We'll get older and older," I say, trying to sound bright and matter-of-fact. "And one day we will die."
"I don't want you to die, Mama."
"Well, I don't want to either, but -- (big, psychologically healthy smile) -- everybody dies."
"Don't die, Mama. I don't want you to die. I don't want Dada to die." (Sometimes, lately, he tries out talking like a big kid and says "my Dad.")
"It's OK, sweetie. It will probably (I can't bring myself to omit that unreassuring word) be a long, long time from now. When we're very old."
"I don't want you to die."

Later, after Peter is home from work, Henry spontaneously tells him, "I don't want you to die." Another time, as we are standing in the kitchen doorway, he tells me confidingly, "I don't want Dada to die because I like him so very much."

Last winter, not so long after Dad died, I was walking out of the library and a little boy was standing by the door wailing, "I want my Daddy, I want my Daddy." A security guard was trying to comfort him, telling him his Daddy was on his way. The boy was beyond comfort. It was clear the boy and his father had lost each other among the bookshelves. I remember very clearly that horrible Roadrunner feeling like scrabbling in thin air when I was out in public with one of my parents and suddenly looked up to see it was a different leg or grocery cart or whatever I had attached myself too, and now I was far from home and ALL ALONE. I thought that as sick with uncomprehending sorrow as I was, for those five or ten minutes, that little boy was grieving more intensely than I.

Last evening, I was refilling the bird feeder and saw a bird lying dead in the snow in the yard. I said something about it to Mom, who was trundling the boys home from the Banneker Center, and Henry heard me.
"I want to see, Mama," he said. I let him through the gate, telling him he could look, not touch. He bent over at the waist like a Suzuki recitalist and walked in a slow circle around the bird. "What is it?" he asked.
"It's the body of a bird," I said.
"Why did it die?"
"I don't know. Maybe from the cold. Maybe it got hurt. Maybe it was very sick."
"What is going on with its eyes?"
A thin blue membrane, like inner eyelids, appeared to have closed up and met in the middle of the bird's eyes. "That's just something that happened when he died," I offered.
Henry bent down even lower.
"Maybe he will get up soon," he said after a few moments. "I think another bird will call the doctor. He's sick. He's very sick." We went inside, and Henry asked for a glass of milk and snatched a toy from James's hands.

There are overlying patterns in the way I feel and think about my dad. It is wavelike: Strong, semi-regular washes of grief come and ebb and come and ebb, sometimes stronger but generally, over time, dispersing their energy. There is also a cycle: At first it was hourly; 1 o'clock was the worst time. Then it was weekly. Tuesdays were worst.Then the 26th of each month, and now it is January again, icy and gray. Sometimes it feels as if Dad were here, hoisting himself up my front steps to pick up a box of wine he'd had shipped to my house, or to bring my pregnant self some chard and sweet potatoes from Bloomingfoods, just the other week. Other times he seems like someone I read about or heard about, not someone I knew, he is so far away. I am not dreaming about him very often. The last time I remember, he was behind a very thick pane of glass, like a cold frame, fogged over, telling me he loved me. I thought the other day: Dad has been dead for almost a year now, and then I thought that made it sound as if being dead were an experience he is having, which is often how it feels to me--but, feeling austere, I forced myself to reword it: It was almost a year ago that Dad died. I wonder whether Henry, who was barely verbal last January, and doesn't know what a year is, is under the influence of its cycles, too.