Ten days ago we had that big snow and ice storm. Schools were closed. After breakfast we walked with the kids to the reservoir. They'd been waiting all winter to use their toboggans.
By the time we got there the sleet was making a ticking sound all around us, and the hill was white but oddly glassy, as if the snow had been laminated.
I stood at the bottom, where the hill merged with the road, stationed to catch sledders before they spilled into the path of traffic (of which there was hardly any, just the occasional slow-going plow or fishtailing station wagon).
There were several successful runs, enlivened by the turbo-speed the coating of ice provided. The kids were gleeful, mouthing the snow like puppies, spinning three-sixties on their way down the hill, getting cocky, inventing new forms.
Then the oldest had another go and this time his speed surpassed all previous runs; he skimmed like a hovercraft, much too fast, and too far to the left, for me to possibly intercept him. He shot straight across the empty road and the driveway opposite, smashing into a garage door which had been left open a foot. His toboggan continued into the garage; he was stopped at the point of contact between the garage door and his shin. There were tears, copious for a ten year old male, and we examined the mark on his leg, which was already swelling, but no major damage was done. His sister crawled on her belly into the stranger's garage to retrieve his toboggan, and he recovered well enough to sneak in an extra run as we were all walking home.
That night in bed, he said he couldn't stop replaying the crash in his mind. He'd overheard a remark someone had made to the effect that if the garage door had been open another foot, 'he might have been beheaded.' This is a child for whom the slightest suggestion of an idea all too often takes gripping hold, and that frightening phrase was now lodged in his imagination; he seemed fixated on it. He asked what would have happened if his head instead of his shin had struck the garage. He asked what the rest of us would have done if he had died.
Several days later, when we went to visit my parents during the school holiday, he was still troubled by thoughts of what might have happened if the garage door had been slightly more open. The spectre of such an occurrence had been interfering with his sleep, and now, at my parents' house, he raised it anew. That was when my mother said, "Did I ever tell you my theory about 'the contract'?"
"The way I think of it," she told him, "
is that when we're born, we get this wonderful prize, we get to be a person in the world. We get to partake of life. There's only one condition: at some point we have to die. That's the contract."
She explained that the way she looks at it, problems arise when people forget that dying was part of the contract all along. Problems arise when we fall into the trap of thinking of death as unnatural. If we accept it as the single condition for receiving the vast, tremendous experience of being alive, if we
keep this contract in mind, it can lift the dread.
"I think it's a great deal," she added, with happy, almost pragmatic conviction, as if she was talking about the price of postage stamps, or apples.
That night when I tucked him him, my son extended his hand to me. I took it and we both squeezed: our good-night shake, which has replaced the old ritual of my kissing his forehead. "I know what Grandmother means," he confided. "About the contract. I mean I get it."
He has not expressed worry over his sledding accident since.
Ten days ago we had that big snow and ice storm. Schools were closed. After breakfast we walked with the kids to the reservoir. They'd been waiting all winter to use their toboggans.
By the time we got there the sleet was making a ticking sound all around us, and the hill was white but oddly glassy, as if the snow had been laminated.
I stood at the bottom, where the hill merged with the road, stationed to catch sledders before they spilled into the path of traffic (of which there was hardly any, just the occasional slow-going plow or fishtailing station wagon).
There were several successful runs, enlivened by the turbo-speed the coating of ice provided. The kids were gleeful, mouthing the snow like puppies, spinning three-sixties on their way down the hill, getting cocky, inventing new forms.
Then the oldest had another go and this time his speed surpassed all previous runs; he skimmed like a hovercraft, much too fast, and too far to the left, for me to possibly intercept him. He shot straight across the empty road and the driveway opposite, smashing into a garage door which had been left open a foot. His toboggan continued into the garage; he was stopped at the point of contact between the garage door and his shin. There were tears, copious for a ten year old male, and we examined the mark on his leg, which was already swelling, but no major damage was done. His sister crawled on her belly into the stranger's garage to retrieve his toboggan, and he recovered well enough to sneak in an extra run as we were all walking home.
That night in bed, he said he couldn't stop replaying the crash in his mind. He'd overheard a remark someone had made to the effect that if the garage door had been open another foot, 'he might have been beheaded.' This is a child for whom the slightest suggestion of an idea all too often takes gripping hold, and that frightening phrase was now lodged in his imagination; he seemed fixated on it. He asked what would have happened if his head instead of his shin had struck the garage. He asked what the rest of us would have done if he had died.
Several days later, when we went to visit my parents during the school holiday, he was still troubled by thoughts of what might have happened if the garage door had been slightly more open. The spectre of such an occurrence had been interfering with his sleep, and now, at my parents' house, he raised it anew. That was when my mother said, "Did I ever tell you my theory about 'the contract'?"
"The way I think of it," she told him, " is that when we're born, we get this wonderful prize, we get to be a person in the world. We get to partake of life. There's only one condition: at some point we have to die. That's the contract."
She explained that the way she looks at it, problems arise when people forget that dying was part of the contract all along. Problems arise when we fall into the trap of thinking of death as unnatural. If we accept it as the single condition for receiving the vast, tremendous experience of being alive, if we keep this contract in mind, it can lift the dread.
"I think it's a great deal," she added, with happy, almost pragmatic conviction, as if she was talking about the price of postage stamps, or apples.
That night when I tucked him him, my son extended his hand to me. I took it and we both squeezed: our good-night shake, which has replaced the old ritual of my kissing his forehead. "I know what Grandmother means," he confided. "About the contract. I mean I get it."
He has not expressed worry over his sledding accident since.