Loving Hard Through the Horror of Being Five

This past weekend, my five-year-old son, Elliot, asked me if he was going to die.

Those words carry weight. "Daddy, am I going to die?"

The tears came soon after, big eye-welling tears because somewhere in his five-year-old brain, he'd made the connection. Real horror came to my son, and nothing could touch him in quite the same way again. Maybe he'd caught just enough of the news or someone talking about the news to shake his frame. Maybe not. The knowing comes for all of us but in different ways.

I remember being five. I remember the day an ambulance came and carried my father away, how my mother didn't come home until nearly midnight, and how my brother spoke of dropping out of school and going to work. It was early fall 1980--the beginning of my brother's senior year. A brain tumor had come for my father.

I remember other things about being young: my grandparents staying with us while Mom was away with Dad. There were trips to see neurologists and CAT scans and other things which seem like bloodletting and leeches now, but delivered state-of-the-art medical care in 1980. Dad changed. He aged faster and vomited often from the cocktail of medications and radiation. He died nine years later, catatonic, in the same hospital where he had been diagnosed.

I also remember how I cried when I thought Kermit the Frog was going to die at the end of The Muppet Movie. Somehow, my five-year-old brain knew, just like Elliot's. Innocence evaporated. Poof. And no horror is truly greater than the loss of that childish innocence. Once it's gone, there is no return. That has always haunted me more than anything. It's the true darkness in the basement, the stranger lurking outside, or the danger in the woods. For me, it wound around the thing which ate my father from the inside out.

My son faces new monsters. We've done horrible things to each other. We've built an artificial world with social media used to insult, divide, and destroy each other. We've killed each other with startling efficiency in Las Vegas, Orlando, Newtown... All that horror, all that innocence lost. We can't go back, and I'm not sure how we can go forward. Where would we go?

What does a five-year-old do after asking, "Daddy, am I going to die?" Where can he go to be safe again?

I have no magic to restore the world--I can't even change what my son now knows. But we play together. We decorate the yard for Halloween and bake cookies at Christmas. We take trips and awe at mountains, hunting for a glimpse of illusive big-horned sheep. We read books together and hug often. We both know, and that knowing makes us love hard.

And love, in the end, is the only thing that really matters.

Love Letter (a work of fiction)

My shift ends at eleven, but I usually don’t come home until two or three. I like to call it “the long way home”. I’m always pretty quiet about it, and you are asleep. I figure you’ve never noticed and don’t think you ever would with how soundly you sleep. It’s not that I’m avoiding you or anything—hell, the best part of my night is crawling under the blankets after taking a quick shower; you keep the bed so nice and toasty warm.

See, I can’t come home right after my shift. I’m sort of revved up, ready to howl at the moon. Usually, I hit a bar or two—sometimes one of those dance clubs downtown. The “face” crowd really fills those places—the “beautiful people”. I still find you plenty attractive; that’s not it at all. Just that something worms into my blood, and I have to wring it out before I come home.
I’m afraid of what might happen if I don’t.

You know those love letters stashed under the bed in the spare room? The old shoebox crammed full of the little snatches we used to write each other? Sometimes I think of those letters when I come home and see you all snuggled in the bed. I have a little box, too, only mine is an old cash box, metal with a tiny clasp. It’s buried down by Stranger Creek. I move it around a lot, different spots almost every week.

Sometimes, when I’m watching the crowd dance at one of those clubs and I see a tattoo (all the young girls have them nowadays), I think of those love letters. Remember how we went back and forth on the tattoo topic when I was in Afghanistan? How you said you’d dump me like a hot rock if I got myself all inked up? I see a tattoo sometimes and I think about how jealous I was back then, back when you were going to college and I was dragging my sorry ass all over the mountains in central Asia. I see a tattoo sometimes, and I think about love letters, especially after you had my name inked on your own skin, even though you hated the idea. I still have that picture, the only one you sent in a letter. We exchanged plenty of digital pics, but that one is special. I have it stashed down at the creek with the rest of my collection.

That something in my blood starts to itch at times, and I go home with one of those girls with a tattoo. I never touch them like that—there’s no sex. I’m sure there could be plenty, but that’s not it. That’s not it at all. I never cheated on you, and I want you to know.

It’s the tattoos, really. The little love letters on their skin. My blood boils over with this kind of jealousy, and I have to have the tattoo.

I keep my knife real sharp for the job. I learned too much in the army.

I take the little love letters down to Stranger Creek and slip them into my cash box with the photo of your tattoo. I have your picture in a Ziploc because I don’t want any blood or mud to spoil it. After I find a new place to stick the box, I usually jump in the creek to wash off the dirt and everything. Sometimes, the water is mighty cold, and I’m chilled down into my bones.

The shower helps with the chill and the rest of the stuff I find caked under my nails, but I’m not really warmed up until I snuggle in next to you.

I love you, baby, and that’s why I have to take the long way home.