A Funeral in Our Future

I let Ethan stay up very late tonight.  He was anxious and keyed up (we all are) and putting him to bed when he's in that kind of wound-up state is always quite the challenge.  This is an understatement on the order of calling the Atlantic Ocean a rather large pond.  Yet another gift of ADD.

I just wasn’t up for the fight of it.  So I let him play and read and watch TV until his eyelids got droopy and his body got floppy and I carried him to bed and let him skip brushing his teeth “just this once.”  And still, he needed to talk once he’d settled into his nest of blankets.

“I don’t like funerals” he said “why does there have to be a funeral?” 

“Nobody likes funerals, honey, but it’s what we do, it’s part of saying goodbye to the people we loved.”

Just then his father came home from the hospital, poked his head into the boys’ room to gaze at the sons he has barely seen these past weeks of caring for his ailing, failing mother.  Hearing Ethan still awake, he leaned in for a goodnight kiss. “Family hug!” Ethan requested and we squeezed ourselves together around him. 

“I miss you”

“I miss you, too, Daddy”

“We’ll spend some time together soon, I promise. After…”

And his sentence trails off.  We know what the after is, no need to say it yet again. 

“I am very sad” Ethan tells me in between yawns. “Tears jumped out of my eyes when Daddy hugged me.”  Unbidden, cartoon images of little teardrops with black spindly legs jumping around Ethan’s head made me smile.

“We’re all sad right now, honey, this is a sad time. But we'll be sad together, help each other through this.” were the last words he heard tonight as his breathing grew simultaneously soft and louder, his hand holding mine slowly released its grip towards slumber.

I tiptoed out of the room as the dancing teardrops on Ethan’s pillow waved their cartoony arms goodbye, promising to keep watch over my sleeping son.