making death fun again

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“What did you wish on the dandelion outside earlier, Rowan?” I asked, hoping he’d forget the rules and include me on his secret inner life.

His eyes widened, looking panicked. “I can’t tell you, or it won’t come true!”

I looked at Tyler, smiling. “Okay, how about if I guess…?” I needled.

“Mommy, I CAN’T!” he seemed more panicked than usual about breaking a rule (a quality I’m so relieved he has innately, unlike Zoe, who could barely care less).

“Actually, if someone guesses, then it doesn’t count as you telling your secret, and then you don’t have to worry about it not coming true,” Tyler offered, uncharacteristically indulging my prying. This, despite me never having gotten his Transcendental meditation mantra out of him, no matter HOW hard I tried!!!!! (And I tried. for weeks. Still trying, in fact. Sometimes I like to ask when he’s half-asleep, hoping he’ll let it slip. He doesn’t. It’s wedged in there, like a keystone to an ancient, divine arch.)

“Okay,” Rowan assented.

“Is it a wish about…mommy?” I asked, hopefully.

“YES!” he yelled. “I wished that you would never, ever die!!!!!” he volunteered, forgetting the rules.

Tyler and I were both so aghast we let out little yelps. Tears sprang to Tyler’s eyes.

“Buddy…why did you wish that?” he asked.

“I just…I just don’t want you to ever, ever die,” he said plainly. I squeezed him tightly, immediately regretting the 3 minutes we allowed him to watch Y The Last Man with us a few days prior.

“I’m not going anywhere, Rowie. I will be annoying you to tell me all your secrets for a long, LONG time,” I assured him.

And this was all weeks before Halloween season.

This was the first Halloween where we were asked to give an explanation for the horror-centric hullaballoo of the holiday. Rowan is 4, and wants to know what a zombie is and why is everything so spooky all of a sudden? Zoe is 2, and wants to know why the skeletons are sitting in that chair?

We took them to a haunted house in the valley (shoutout to Molly for the rec!), and the guy running it asked if we wanted a character to jump out at us or not. The kids said they did, but after winding through shadowy corners with skeletons, clowns, monkeys, and a man whose legs were chopped off with an axe, turns out the jump-fright was too much. They buried their heads in our shoulders and winced, but when we reached the end of the haunted house, they shouted “LET’S DO IT AGAIN!”

The man at the entrance asked again: “Do you want a jump this time?”

“I want you to jump out at us, but not with that scary mask on. This time, just your own face,” Rowan parsed.

The kind man complied, and that turned out to be just the right amount of scary. After, the pink sunset ride to our friend’s Halloween party was peppered with questions.

“But why was that man’s legs cut off????”

I tried to explain that, like Disneyland, Halloween is a way to feel something out of the mundane. That, because we are lucky and privileged enough to walk around not feeling frightened every minute of the day, as a culture, we’ve decided to pile it all on in October. For one night (but consumerist maximalism, so: a month), we agree that death and all its gruesome potentialities is entertainment.

We’ve decided to make death…fun?

It’s absurd and impossible to explain this concept to a child, who already barely grasps the concept of death, even with Seymour’s disappearance last year. We wound up repeating ourselves over the next many days.

The man’s legs are cut off because it’s scary AND it’s not real which means it’s SPOOKY which means it’s FUN!!!!!! We exclaimed, positively unsure of it ourselves at this point.

The day finally came, and after several nights of cutting, iron-stitching, and hot-gluing various fabrics we purchased on multiple trips to JoAnn’s (JoAnn’s: We Give Away Coupons Like Airborne Leaflet Propaganda Because You’ll Never Get Away With Just the One Trip!), we donned our costumes and walked through the flat streets of Pasadena. One man was so charmed by Zoe’s “Orange Juice With A Straw” costume that he asked if she knew the alphabet just to get her to stick around awhile. She dutifully sang for him, and he dropped a candy for each letter into her bag, shaking his head in disbelief at her gravel-voiced charms.

We met a family whose dad was on crutches.

“What a trooper!” I cheered him on. “How’d you do it?”

“Basketball,” he winced. “I tore my Achilles.”

“I’m reading a book about Achilles right now!” I exclaimed. “You should read it, since you’re living it. Gain some inspiration.”

I can only hope this kind-faced, broken-footed man named Mike (Mark?) went home that night and ordered Song of Achilles, and now here we are, strangers at night, mere miles apart, simultaneously reading perhaps the most beautiful homoerotic love story of all time/civilizations. Together, reading about people who are very much dead, (and may have never lived at all), but who make us feel such profundity in the mundanity of the worn sheets, and the encroaching darkness, and the weekly tyranny of the CSA box’s arrival.

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