She is nine, beloved, as open-faced as the sky and as self-contained. I have watched her grow. As recently as three or four years ago, she had a young child’s perfectly shallow receptiveness; she fitted into the world of time, it fitted into her, as thoughtlessly as sky fits its edges, or a river its banks. But as she has grown, her smile has widened with a touch of fear and her glance has taken on depth. Now she is aware of some of the losses you incur by being here–the extortionary rent you have to pay as long as you stay.
Annie Dillard
“Teaching a Stone to Talk: Expeditions and Encounters”
When I was a child, I had a very different view of adult life than I have as an adult. From my child’s view, life was ever-changing until reaching adulthood where it looked like it went on cruise control. Nice and steady with few changes.
In my defense, childhood is a time of rapid and dramatic changes. In the first few years of life, we grow and change more than in any other period of our lives. We go from being a person who can’t roll over, understand or speak words, or feed ourselves to someone who runs around the house and across the yard, reads books, imagines and tells stories, and negotiates sharing cookies and toys with siblings and friends. The changes are drastic and amazing like no other times in our lives.
As we are old enough for school, the changes slow but continue at a strong pace. Each year we change grades in school and need new clothes and shoes because last year’s models no longer fit. I remember looking forward to the day when I could keep wearing a pair of shoes I liked until they wore out and not because my toes were pushing the ends.
From the rushing stream of childhood, adulthood looked like a peaceful lake. A few ripples here and there but mostly steady and calm. Perhaps this was because I was often oblivious of the lives of others as a child and lacked the motivation and skills for keen observation. Perhaps it was because my parents provided a mostly stable, safe, and supportive home environment and shielded my brothers and me from most adult worries, so I didn’t feel the need to be in a constant state of surveillance.
At age 10, however, I began to get a different picture of adult life. My maternal grandmother died unexpectedly. Hers was the first visitation and funeral that I can remember. During one of the two evenings of visitation at the funeral home, I remember going up to the casket to experience the presence of her dead body by myself. I touched her cool hand and stared at her face until I felt tears coming to my eyes. Death was a part of life that I had not experienced up close before.
The next year, one of my mother’s older brothers died with a brain tumor. During this year, my maternal grandfather’s dementia also came into my awareness. It became clear to the family that following his wife’s death, it was not safe for him to live alone. For a while he lived with our family, and I remember running down the street to ask him to come back to our house as he was wandering off.
Eventually, he went to live in a nursing home. Before going there, he was hospitalized for a time. Visiting him in the hospital with my mom, I reminded him about the time he poured water on my head to “cool me down” when I was angry and sulking behind a living room chair. Sadly, for me, he didn’t remember.
Being in the nursing home was terrible for my mother. She felt guilty when she didn’t visit and distressed when she did as he didn’t remember who she was. Even as a child, it felt like a relief when he died and she didn’t have to struggle with what to do.
In three years, my mother lost her mother, an older brother, and her father. With her parents gone, her family began to drift apart. For one who was deeply connected to family, it was overwhelming.
Sometimes on a Sunday morning in our small-town church, she would leave the worship service to walk around the block by herself. As I would learn as an adult, the pause of daily living activities and the reflective nature of worship services can feel too much for many grieving people. She would return wearing sunglasses to hide the puffiness and redness of weeping eyes.
Those challenging, loss-filled years for my mom affected all of us in the family. Death had entered my world in new and significant ways and during those pivotal pre-teen years of childhood. Life felt less predictable. Adults, at least older adults, were vulnerable to dying, and those left behind were vulnerable to great suffering.
Before those years, I knew in my head that all people eventually died, but I hadn’t experienced that knowing in my heart and being. Even with these experiences, death felt far away from children and young people, and it would take working in a children’s hospital to receive the heart and gut learning of how sometimes children die, too.
Adult life no longer seems like a peaceful lake, although it may not be the rushing stream of childhood. Perhaps it is a wandering stream that moves through a wide diversity of landscapes and takes a corresponding wide variety of forms from placid and deep pools to tumbling rapids. Continually moving and changing and adding tributaries of experience until it empties into an ocean of mystery at its end. Or maybe it is more merging than ending. Or merging and ending.
From an adult perspective, all of life from birth to death is full of change and so it is full of loss. The rent we pay for living and loving as Annie Dillard suggests. Rent because life is not permanent, and we pay because life can be beautiful even with pain.
I didn’t know much about that as a ten-year-old child, but like all of us, I was learning. And unlike how it looked to my childhood self, all of life, adulthood included, is full of learning and sometimes from loss.
