Matthew’s silkworm moth emerged from its cocoon while we were at the beach! This is a good tiding of great joy for Matthew, who had begun to suspect it had died in there. The second grade at SSFS always does a big unit on silk, culminating in the raising of silkworms. The worms start out tiny, and get to be big and ugly, and they eat a lot of mulberry leaves along the way. Fortunately, we have a big mulberry tree in our backyard, and there are others at school, so these guys did not go hungry. It takes several weeks, and the worms always get named and become pets. Matthew’s is named Alexander Ovechkin, after the great hockey player. While Matthew was out of school following his recent concussion, I had to take him in so he could visit Alexander Ovechkin the silkworm and make sure he was doing okay, which he was. But after Alexander went into his cocoon, we heard no more out of him, and he was well overdue to emerge by the time we left for the beach. We were very sad.
How happy I was when Sean and I came home from the beach—we came home two days earlier than the others, due to Sean having commitments in town—to be able to call Matthew and report that Alexander Ovechkin the moth was sitting on the counter looking pretty pleased with himself. For the record, although the Internets say these domesticated silk moths have lost all ability to fly, Alexander Ovechkin made it all the way to the other end of the kitchen, at one point. So he’s fairly fulfilled, I guess, for a silkworm moth.
The last day of second grade, when Matthew had brought Alexander Ovechkin home in his cocoon, in a little plastic cup, the teachers, Amy and Katharine, had sent home a note which read:
“Care and feeding of your silk moth:
1. It does not eat.
2. It does not fly.
3. It will die within a week.
4. It may lay eggs which will not hatch.
5. Have a great summer!”
As a lesson in mortality, silkworms can’t be beat. This is our family’s third experience with their brief, tragic lives. I believe that somewhere in Sean’s and Julia’s rooms, you can still find two tiny silkworm coffins. Tears were shed over those little bodies, even though they had also come home with that same cheery note from Amy and Katharine, explaining that silkworms are a temporary thing, not meant to last more than a week. Sean and Julia still cried over them. They didn’t even get to have kids! And they never got to fly!
Now, mortality has been an issue in our house lately.
Matthew, who is eight, is obviously wrestling with it, but is nowhere near able to use his words to express what he’s going through. At school, apparently, he has been a little angel. I have this on the authority of two teachers and a guidance counselor, all of whom have made it their business to keep a special eye on Matthew while I’m sick and give him lots of opportunities to express his feelings. As his counselor said, school seems to be his happy place, where everything is still running along normally.
But at home, it has been another story. Matthew has been very angry with me, angrier than any of my children have ever been. He really wants things to be lots more normal than they are. He is not enjoying my baldness or any of our little recent cancer jokes, not one little bit. Regularly, he blows up, and I get screamed at: “I hate you.” “Never talk to me, ever again.” “I don’t want to be in this family anymore.” The screaming can start at any time, over any innocuous thing, like me asking him to brush his teeth or put on a clean shirt or find his ball for soccer practice.
We have the name of a good child psychiatrist, and John and I are debating whether it is time to make the call.
“Do you remember what you were like when your father was sick?” my mom asks me.
I do. My father died of brain cancer when I was eight years old, the same age Matthew is now. And that same year, my aunt and my uncle also died of cancer. It was a terrible time. My reaction was to become, among other things, a total hypochondriac. I devoured all the stories in Readers’ Digest that featured young people dying nobly of cancer. I was pretty sure I would get leukemia, or something. I developed serious problems sleeping. I never screamed “I hate you” at my mother, but I am sure she would have paid good money to have someone else try to get me to go to sleep, just once, there for a while. If anybody ever needed counseling, it was me then, but people didn’t run out and get counseling, in those days, even if they needed it.
“He’s terrified of losing you,” my mom says.
Of course, she is right, though it doesn’t mean he can make a habit out of screaming “I hate you!” at me during soccer practice, with other horrified moms pretending not to listen. For now, my approach is going to be to try to get him to talk about how he’s feeling, which is clearly very upset, thank you very much, while still setting boundaries about appropriate ways to do so. (No, it is not appropriate to throw your water bottle hard at Mom because you are scared she is dying.)
I can relate to him freaking out over my mortality. I’ve been freaking out about it, this week, myself. Although several of you people reading this blog have told me how “brave” and full of “spirit” I am and so forth, this week I pretty much fell apart. Fortunately, it happened on Wednesday, while everyone was out of the house at the beach and I could keep it to myself.
For some reason, it really hit me for the first time, that, damn, I AM going to die, if not of breast cancer now, then of something else some other time. And I don’t want to die! Now or ever! I started feeling tightness in my chest, it was hard to breathe. It was a classic panic attack, like the ones I used to get on airplanes before I started taking Xanax on airplanes.
This all deteriorated, pretty quickly, into a crisis of faith—if God were real why would He design humans to feel eternal but pretty obviously be mortal? What was he thinking? And why is all the evidence for God so mysterious, anyway, that you have to take it all on faith. I haven’t got much right at this moment. Of course, the idea that maybe God isn’t there does not make the idea of dying any more palatable, so it all became a big spiral of doom in my mind. Not a fun couple of days.
I am not sure why it hit me all of a sudden. I was in the middle of reading a book recommended by a friend, a book written by a monk about the benefits of the monastic lifestyle, of celibacy and “detaching” from the world. I’m reading it and thinking, hell, I don’t want to detach from the world—I want to be attached to the world in every way I can think of! And then I’m just freaking out.
It shouldn’t be such a surprise to me that I’m going to die, some day. Of course you know intellectually that you are mortal. I’ve seen people die before. I held my grandmother’s hand while she died, and it wasn’t terrible at all; it was a sacred moment. So why am I so terrified? It’s one thing to know something intellectually, and it’s another to feel a tumor in your own breast, and be aware that it might be getting bigger. But, particularly since I’m a Christian, supposed to believe in a loving God and the resurrection of the body and so forth, why am I suddenly so afraid?
I still don’t know. Partly it is Matthew, I’m pretty sure. I really, really don’t want to leave a kid at the same point where my dad left me. That was something I never dreamed I might be doing. But part of it is also my own bodily fear, which I have to just work through or wait out.
I had the whole weekend to myself, which was good, because I haven’t had much time recently to quietly freak out and think these things through. But Sean left early yesterday for a church mission trip, and John and Julia and Matthew don’t get home from the beach until tonight. It’s been good to be able to sit around and cry and not freak out anyone else.
I did go to church this morning, and that was good. It was Trinity Sunday, and Martha mentioned in the course of her sermon that even at the Great Commissioning, some of the disciples were still doubting. And that was okay; it showed they were still thinking and wrestling with their faith. As a fellow doubter, I appreciated that.
And while everyone still hugged me and asked how I am, and I said, “Good!” because physically I am feeling fine, I did admit to a few people, “Good. But I’ve sort of spent the week freaking out.”
I love my church. None of the people to whom I admitted this told me to have faith, or cheer up, or anything else that is easy to say. They just looked at me, and listened. One person said, “Well, of course, you’ve got your mortality right in your face right now, don’t you?”
One of the other people was a woman who is one of my favorite people, a Christian who does not shy away from looking into the shadows.
“I’ve been freaking out all week,” I told her. “I don’t know why. Nothing’s changed.”
She does not look surprised. She knows that, until now, I hadn’t been freaking out.
“So you did,” she said. “And, you survived.”
And with that one statement, she made me feel better. She acknowledged my faith crisis, totally didn’t judge me for it, and pointed out that, already, it was passing. I felt better than I had in days.
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