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Baby’s First Existential Crisis
Unintended Consequences
Our son isn’t quite five-years-old. From the bathtub, he looked up at me and asked, “Daddy, will the cats die?”
Whoa. Where did this come from? Not wanting to lie to him, I told him, “Yes, they will die someday. We will all die someday.” The tears begin to well up in his eyes.
Oh No! What had I done? Should I have lied to him?
The tears grew. Like Indiana Jones’s boulder, they threatened to bowl me down. “But I don’t wanna die!”
I started tearing up with him. “Don’t worry about this right now, buddy; you’re not even five yet.”
He was not convinced. Where was this in the parental instruction manual?
I tried to think of the explanation that would provide him some peace. I was raised Catholic, so there is always the “heaven” story, but I don’t really believe that. At least not in a traditional “St. Peter and the Pearly Gates” kind of way.
Since I was young, I hoped that when we die, as long as we were good people, we got to go to heaven and be with the people we wanted to be with. I always imagined seeing my grandfather and playing some guitar with him. Maybe throwing a tennis ball with my childhood dog.
