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| Image credit: Photo by [phil h] on Flickr Licensed under Creative Commons |
We have a friend who is pregnant right now, and this has got my son Austen thinking about life, although oddly enough, not how life begins, but rather how it ends. He hasn't really expressed much curiosity at all about how life starts; he has flipped straight to the end of the book and wants to know about death.
"When am I going to die? When are you going to die? How old will I be? What happens to us when we die?" he asks one day as we get ready for his bath.
He's not satisfied with the fact that I can't answer these questions. No one knows when or how we die. Probably we'll be very old when we die. Probably he'll be able to live on his own. I hope. (Will he really be able to take care of himself one day?) But no one knows. I point to his grandparents and say that three of them are still alive and older than his daddy and I are, so we all have a long way to go yet.
I tell him that when we die, our bodies decay and slowly transform. Ashes to ashes. Dust to dust. Our bodies are recycled. We become part of the bacteria and soil and plants and animals. He wants to know what happens to our memories, our thoughts, our souls. I try to tell him that what happens to our spirit, that part of us that makes us ourselves, is the greatest mystery of all. That's what religions and myths try to explain: reincarnation, Heaven, Hell, Nirvana, Valhalla, passage over the river Styx to Hades... But I don't get to any of that before he decides that since the matter that makes him up will come back around, his spirit will too. He's invented reincarnation for himself without knowing the word.
"My body is going to become something else, so I think I will too. But will I remember being me when that happens?"
"I don't know. No one really knows..."
"I think I'm going to be an animal after I die. But if I am will you know me? What if I'm a bug? Would you recognize me if I were a bug? Or would you try to squish me? What if you tried to squish me?"
"I think I would always know you, buddy."
"Yes. I would be the little bug who was following you around. And you would know me."
That thought seemed to satisfy him, and he shifted his focus to squirting water from the mouth of a rubber fish into the eye of a plastic shark instead.
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