Let’s Never Go to the Future So That We Never Die
Thoughts on Mortality from a Four-Year-Old
Leaves are turning yellow in front of us as we drive up the narrow gravel road to a hidden vineyard at the top of one of the Blue Ridge mountains. There’s an East Coast lightness in the air that comes with the crispness of fall, the clear-eyed business of transition. Our family arrives at the tasting room and is immediately anxious around all the people. My four-year-old son asks why people aren’t wearing their masks and my seventy-one-year old mother tells me she doesn’t even want to touch the table in front of her. We move outside, find a wide-open spot along the rail on the lower level looking out over the vines. Open and gulp a minerally viognier, one of the better Virginia wines. It tastes like the mists and red dirt terroir. We toast to being somewhere that isn’t our house.
In the time of the coronavirus, my son has fixated on death. That people are dying, will die, have died. He is empathetic and concerned. He also gleefully points out cemeteries and delights when I tell him that flowers on a grave means that that person’s family has come to visit where they are buried. His pre-K teacher asked us about his interest, apparently, he talks about dead bodies, zombies, and death like some children talk about Paw Patrol. We laughed it off and blamed Halloween stories. That excuse won’t last past October though.
We tell him that he won’t die, and we will be here with him for a long time. It’s my job to take care of you and I will be here, I say. You are safe, you are loved. Zombies aren’t real, they are just stories. It is part of being human to die, we say. Nothing lives forever. But when? He demands to know.
“Sometime in the future, we will die. That is part of being alive.” I share the truth.
“Well, let’s never go to the future so that we don’t die.” He triumphs over my reason.
Okay, sweetie. He makes us all promise that we won’t go to the future. In a surreal twist, Stevie Nick’s live version of ‘Landslide,’ which she dedicates to her father at the start of the song, is playing quietly on our minivan speakers. I think about how she must have been in her fourties during the recording, feeling ‘old’ looking back at the crazy ’70s of Fleetwood Mac’s cocaine- and drama- tinged success. How now she’s in her seventies, and thanks to the lovely microtrends of TikTok — and something so attuned to this cultural moment — their music is coming back. ‘Dreams’ is on the charts again. What’s old is new, but everything still dies. Our wheel dip into the contours of the road while leaves fall in front of our path.
In the passenger seat, I think that my son knows something I don’t about mindfulness. That if we don’t go to the future in our minds, we won’t die, because in our present we are always alive. I want to write, eat sugar, and feed my babies all good things. The simple pleasures of present-ness. Next weekend I’m kicking it up a notch. I am going to jump out of a plane strapped to a stranger because I impulse bought a skydiving Groupon when quarantine started. Because I want to be lightness falling from air. I’ll be with an old friend because I told my husband we shouldn’t both be on the same small plane if something goes haywire. My friend just had a baby at the start of quarantine too, so he’s been stuck in the house like all of us, but more intently.
We laugh and say, ‘God we’ll feel so alive…if we don’t die.’
I’m pretty sure we won’t. But that’s the future.
