My daughter, who is very sensitive and expesses herself very well for her age, often has bouts of melancholia just before she goes to sleep. While this is usually a ruse to extend her bedtime, some of the things she says are often profound.
One day she was crying because she could no longer play with her old toys. When we pointed out that she definitely could, she said no people will think poorly of me if I went on a baby slide, I just can’t. I can’t even stand under the table and my father can’t hold me up so that I could fly up near the roof. I don’t want to grow up, she said, I want to stay the same way, a little baby, but I can’t.
Another day she cried saying she doesn’t like science because it makes her doubt the existence of fairies and unicorns.
There is a common thread running through her maladies, namely grieving about our own deaths. We are continuously dying, as I had said in a previous post, our two year old self and our eight year old self have very little in common in terms of our physical manifestation. We are almost different people linked only by a tenuous chain of memories.
My daughter is merely articulating the loss of her previous me, the one that accepted fairies as a fact of life and one that could squeeze into spaces she can’t any more. She also realizes the futility of returning to that previous person, because that person no longer exists, and the best one can do is simulate a person no longer there, and that’s silly even for an eight year old.
It leads me to wonder on my own deaths, and look back at the dead me-s, and grieve for them too, their innocence, their optimism, their ability to eat without thinking of carbs, their ability to say things without caring for judgment, their friends who are no longer, their dreams that died with them.
I look back at them with nostalgia and I know, like my daughter, that they are gone, my dead selves, and all I can do is simulate them, over a glass of rum, watching 90s songs or old cricket matches, while knowing that this is all very silly but that’s where the rum helps, dulling the self-awareness.
And I am thankful too, thankful for being here, in this space and time, with what I have that I soon will not. For only when you die so many times do you realize the joy of being alive.
Very insightful
This ''was'' a great read.