I'm back from being a grandma full time, and I miss my granddaughter, but am happily doing laundry and getting lists going for appointments put off, grocery shopping and reconnecting with friends. We rode many trains, a boat and now it's time for grandma to rest up. What joy a grandchild is, and how invigorated I feel around her! My granddaughter, daughter and I were in the hotel in side by side queen beds, so I overheard my granddaughter telling her mother, very seriously, that she did not want to die. She is 3 years and four months. Her mom told her she wasn't going to die. Then she said was she going to die ever. Her mom told her not for a long, long time. She said she didn't want to get old, was she going to get old? Same answer. She didn't want to get old because she didn't want red hands. Her mother said she was so young and she had many many years to live.
Next day I said to my daughter. I'm with her. This growing old business is disgusting! We laughed. But it was the essential question, and at three, she gets it. I pray she loves her life and it is very, very long. I don't believe I was as precocious as my granddaughter, but I remember worrying about the universe and life on other planets, and god and death and the atomic bomb. And I was pretty young. It's like Gerald Manley Hopkins' "Spring and Fall to a Young Child". "Margaret, are you grieving, over golden groves' unleaving".
It's hard to imagine not being in the world, and, without understanding our interconnectedness, terrifying. Our world is ourselves, but we sense, even when very young, that it is not the true world. My granddaughter seemed comforted by her mother's reassurances, but us older people do represent something disturbing - we're on our way to somewhere else, but where?
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