If you allow yourself to hear this sort of remark at face value, you tend to go right to Haley Joel Osment in The Sixth Sense and the “I-See-Dead-People” scene. You imagine that fucked up little dead girl, dribbling the rat poison out of the side of her mouth, standing just over his shoulder, nodding in agreement. But it usually takes only one or two questions with Jackson, before you realize he’s coming from another place altogether.
Usually that place is somewhere out in left field or beyond, but this time, when he explains himself, it kind of makes sense. He’s lying in bed as I tuck him in, asking, “Now why would you say something like that, Jackson? Daddy’s not planning on dying any time soon.”
He reaches up and gently strokes my goatee. “Your beard looks gray. You’re getting old. You’re gonna die soon.”
I explain to him that even though I am aging, I am far from being aged, and I repeat that I plan on being around for a long, long time. He appears skeptical of this point, and a cute little worry line forms between his two perfect eyebrows.
I add the obligatory Lion King Mufasa speech, one I’ve delivered to both sons before, about how when we die we live on in the hearts of our loved ones, and therefore we mustn’t worry about dying. We must concern ourselves instead with how to live our lives in the best way we possibly can.
I’m writing this in a slightly cynical tone, but I really do believe these words quite deeply. I realized it when I said my final farewells to my father, eleven years ago this coming Monday, on April 18, 2000. Even as I was wailing out my sadness and grief in front of family and friends on that beautiful Easter morning of his funeral, I could sense my father there with me, as he always had been throughout my life up to that moment, his gentle, guiding hand on my shoulder. Whenever I need to, I can still feel his comforting embrace.
I want to hold my own boys closely enough so that they can draw upon the memory of that embrace, even after I’m gone.
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