“Mommy, why do people die?” he asks me as he snuggles next to me just before falling asleep.
“Well,” I tell him, “people get sick and they get hurt, and sometimes that causes them to die.”
His body starts to hitch with tears, so I pull him closer.
“My grandpa died!” he sobs, and I try to shoosh him as I wipe tears from his face.
“Yes, Grandpa got sick and died.”
“I don’t want to die, Mommy! I don’t want to die and be an angel!” he cries uncontrollably and buries his face into my shirt. “Mommy, will you die, too?” he asks. My heart hurts as I try to find the right words, so that I don’t lie to him, but also to comfort him.
“Mommy will be here for a long, long time,” I tell him. “I’ll be here when you grow up and become a daddy and when you have grand babies too.”
He thinks about this for a moment, but its not enough to stop the tears, nor the hitch in his breathing as he tries to comprehend a life as an adult.
He’s my gentle child, the extra-senstitive one, who hurts to the very core at life’s injustices and notices when people are cruel, and understands that bad things happen, and that people die. It’s got to be tough for a just-turned-four year old to understand so much about life already, and to already be contemplating life without his mother by his side.
“Mommy, I want to keep you forever,” he tells me as he snuggles in closer, wraps his arms around me, and falls asleep.
Marianne Paiva, recovering paramedic and adrenaline junky who comes to Ethnography.com after 4 years driving ambulances very, very fast. When she gave up life in the fast lane, she decided to study paramedics instead, and wrote the book, Breathe: Essays from a Recovering Paramedic, which every trauma junky and ambulance chaser should buy multiple copies of from Amazon.com.
A professor told her after she finished her B.A. at Chico State in 1999 that she could study paramedics as a vocation, if not a living. This she has done off and on for ten years or so, while also teaching Introduction to Sociology, First Year Experience, Sociology of Stress, Population, Ethnicity and Nationalism, and other courses for California State University, Chico. On slow days in class, she wakes students up with stories about ambulances, and funny stories about freshmen. In her spare time, she gardens, tends to her children, and writes creative Facebook postings, and Ethnography.com blogs. You can connect with Marianne at her website www.mariannepaiva.com and also purchase her collection of essays here from Amazon.com. Marianne Paiva is a lecturer in the department of Sociology at California State University, Chico. Currently an inactive author, awaiting a poke with a sharp stick.