Don't Fear The Ripper

On letting the good ghosts in

As I got to talk about in Courtney’s Martin’s lovely newsletter last week (welcome, Examined Family crew!), the curses of ADHD can also, at times, be gifts. My son got to experience this a few weeks ago when, at the seasonal Halloween store Spirit, I impulsively agreed to the purchase of a very expensive battery-powered grim reaper who, when you tried to pull a piece of candy out of his bowl, or really just considered stepping near him, jerked his head up, flashed his evil red eyes and said any number of terrifying phrases such as (cue evil cackle) “Welcome to our graaaaaaveyard!”

i draw the line at, and only at, zombie babies

“Grimmy,” as my family now calls him, has come to be a beloved part of our clan. Sure, he absolutely terrifies our three-year-old, but he also supplies us with candy, fun, and the best thing of all, watching other people freak the fuck out. Yesterday, we set him on the path leading up to our building and spied from the window as the occasional passer-by fell for our gag. As Ross Gay would say, delight!

But the addition of a grim reaper to our brood has brought up some questions. When I explained to the kids the mythology of the grim reaper, they asked, “do we believe that?” I was hard-pressed to think of anyone who really believed in the grim reaper, and yet, here we were, giving it a starring role in our death stories. My three-year-old asked her dad the other night, in her saying-words-slightly-wrong way that I hope never ends, “are ‘rippers’ real?” And then, more urgently. after truly visualizing in her tiny, exploding brain the image of a scary man who comes to lead you away when you die, “Mama, am I going to die?”

Perhaps to a fault, I don't love lying to children. I’m cool with scamming them, bribing them, selectively presenting certain facts, but lying doesn’t sit well for me. Of all the things to lie to your kids about, though, death is pretty enticing. Who wants to tell their kids that someday, any day really, everyone they love will perish? As I wrote about last year, we have all been getting more practice with talking to kids about death recently, but there are still so many facets of it that I find new and confusing, and where I bump up against a kind of void of references to draw from. I could not think of a way to tell her the truth that would not also be terrifying. So I said, walking down the stairs with my two naked children, post “double bubble” (that’s when they decide they want to take a bath together, and promise that they will have calm bodies and get along, and you run the whole friggin bath and strip them down and get your arms all wet and within four minutes you are pulling them both out, screaming and crying), “Yes, but probably not for a very long time.”

This was, understandably not what she wanted to hear and she started crying and saying “I don't want to die,” the second-hardest five words to hear come out of your little girls’ mouth (first place: “I wanna read Fancy Nancy!”). Her older brother added that she probably wouldn't die unless she was very sick or very old. She was comforted by the fact that she had just got a cold but didn't have one anymore, so probably wasn't going to die anytime soon. And I left it there. But, of course, she woke up in the middle of the night that night begging me to tell her she wasn't going to die, perhaps imagining Grimmy and his friends pulling her into the depths of hell with their animatronic hands.

too. long.

I just read a great book, well, to be truthful, three-quarters of a book, which consists of feminist, modern retellings of Japanese folktales. There are, even only 75% of the way through, a shit-ton of ghosts in these stories. Some of them are creepy, like the two door-to-door saleswomen who force themselves into a widower’s home and manage to make horror out of presenting your business card. But most of them are pretty cool, nice even. One ghost eats a lot of her hostess’ snacks. The other takes a bath and, it is implied, makes very tender love to a lonely woman. We wondered, when we discussed it in our book group, if Japanese culture has a different relationship to ghosts than ours does. Here in the US of A, as we all experienced last night, we are told that ghosts are scary things. They hang from the eaves. They come for revenge. They welcome you to the graveyard, but you know it’s not going to be a fun visit. Even if you believe in heaven (and I don’t), which is a sweet twist to death, you also have to accept the possibility of hell.

My friend’s family is from the Philippines, and as we discussed all of the real-life death that was happening around her lately, and the ghoulish American take on the afterlife, she began to talk about how differently her culture deals with death. “I have relatives I’ve never met,” she told me, “who, in their death, I know better than many of the living.” The dead are talked about constantly, and their pictures adorn many a family altar. She has always celebrated her dead on their birthdays, on the anniversary of their deaths, and on November 1st, today, which is called Araw ng mga Patay, a phrase I definitely, if you could hear me now, am pronouncing correctly. My friend feels that her positive, lively relationship to the no-longer-breathing (here I originally wrote “no-longer-living,” which she corrected, thus the difference in mindset) is a gift she gets to pass on to her son, who will receive lots of other messages from other places about the taboo nature of dying and talking about those who have died.

Today is also Dia de los Muertos, which represents a lot of the, “death is part of life, the dead are still with us” vibe that people like me, White and Jewish, just never got. Thank goodness for Coco, but it is still hard for me not to consider that movie “scary,” which, of course, is the whole reason we need more movies like it. Yesterday, we stopped outside the window of a local store that I can only describe as selling “‘Older White Berkeley lady who sometimes wears a dashiki’ housewares” to admire the ofrendas set up there, to discuss what we might want on ours, to consider making one for our dead, who I, acculturated as I have been, still feel afraid of bringing up as often as I do.

cant we just, like, have them both?

In the bath last night, where all of the meaty conversations happen, my son asked about the people we love who had died. A friend of my husband’s died suddenly this weekend, which we had not shared, but if anyone can sense these things, it’s a five-year-old. What is cancer? How can one person survive it and another not? Why did his grandfather, my father, outlive his best friend, my godfather Bert, if they were the same age? Don’t older people die first? He asked if he’d ever met Bert, which always trips me up a bit, as a question. In one way, I told him, no, he wasn’t born until a few months after Bert’s death, he was inside my body at his funeral. In another sense, I told him, though I never learned the language to describe this, I am sure they know each other, quite well. Bert’s yahrzeit, the Jewish anniversary of a death, just passed, and we failed to light a candle. Instead, we watch the hummingbirds come to the feeder he gave us, hanging from the lemon tree in the backyard, and sometimes, when one stops, suspended in mid-air, I get that feeling, the one I don’t have words for, one I hope my kids learn how to describe as easily as they discuss what they ate for breakfast or whether the day will be cloudy or clear. Sometimes when my kids are knowingly mischievous, I put on my best Texas lilt and threaten a “spankin,” something Bert was always facetiously offering to imagined offenders. Are these moments sad ones? And if they are, is it necessary to hide all this sadness from our children? My son insists that, in utero, he was also sad at Bert’s funeral, that he felt it, which sounds spot on to me. “But we were also happy,” I told him, “We were also laughing, because we got to spend a whole day thinking about him and how wonderful he was.” Is. I don’t know.

I am not a craftsy mom, I’m more of the burping-contest type, but I just may break out the tissue paper and watercolors tonight, just might try and get over my fear of letting my dead ones live, regardless of breath. I know there are big books I could read that would explain to me why my people have to resort to horror stories in order to reconcile death with life, but I won’t read those. I’ll just trudge forward in my awkward attempts at making myself better for my children, which of course, is really for me. I would like Peanut M&M’s on my altar, for the record. Maybe Grimmy will stick around to give me some—that would certainly make me smile.

How do you honor the dead or the no longer breathing?

-This is a short and sweet post on making an altar with your kids.

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Also, this:

If you have 45-minutes and an open mind, I highly recommend this review of all of the different M&M flavors, which includes quotables like “I am not optimistic about white-chocolate peanut M&Ms” and “I don't think I'm the target audience for the red, white, and blue mix of milk-chocolate M&Ms.” De-light.

preach it