Honesty

This morning on the way to school, Emily asked me who bought her bike – she was supposed to ride it today in a trike-a-thon fundraiser but it rained (she still had questions about the bike though!).  So I told her that Grandpa bought it (my Dad).  So then she started asking how he was – “how my Grandpa doing, he sick Momma”.  Well, I bit the bullet and we started the conversation I have been putting off for over a month now.  I told her that he was old and sick, and that our hearts are like batteries and when you’re old and sick, they stop working just like batteries.  So Grandpa isn’t with us anymore because his battery stopped working, but he’s in heaven now and we can talk to him whenever we want.  Of course, next came “what is heaven”, which I tried to explain as best I could. And then came what I didn’t expect and I don’t know that I’ve heard before – “I love my Grandpa”.  Yeah, I started crying like a baby and I struggled to get out “I love Grandpa too, and we will always love him and he will always love us”.

I know that this is the first of what will most likely be many conversations about Grandpa and where he is and why we can’t see or talk to him.  But she needed to know and I wanted to be the one that told her.  I still have rather vivid memories of my Grandmother dying; I was almost 5 years old and my aunt told my parents to  not tell me because I wouldn’t understand.  But I was still brought to the wake, where I sat in a separate room alone during a prayer service. I snuck a peek into the room and I saw my Grandmother lying there and I was so confused!  Why is Grandma sleeping in that room with everyone???  And the next day we went to church, where I watched my parents walk down the aisle after a big brown box – what the heck???  And then the cemetery, where I was given a rose to put on the casket and for some reason that’s when it hit me that she was dead. She wasn’t sleeping; that was why everyone was so sad. Grandma had died and I had figured it out on my own. I cried and cried; I cried myself to sleep in the backseat of my cousin Rick’s white car, on the shoulder of his then girlfriend. I didn’t want anything like that to happen with my daughter; I never want her to say that I didn’t tell her because that wasn’t fair to do to me and I won’t do it to her.  I always want to be honest with her, no matter how much it may hurt me to do it.