You (Part V)

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5) Bereavement
Time: 7 years

Your first close encounter with death will arrive when you are eleven, the age where I finally decide to tell you your story, without the ending, of course.

At the funeral of your grandmother, I was trying my best not to cry, for I knew it would upset you. Brave as I tried to be, my sorrow must have been plain on my face, for you asked me a question.

Will I, you asked timidly, grieve too if you died like grandmamma?

It was like a punch to my solar plexus when I heard you ask that question. The shock of your child asking you a question like that far outweighs queries on the birds and the bees.

Upset, I had left the funeral early, clutching your tiny hand tightly as I drive back home, my body ridden with intermittent tremors that shook my very core. On the way home, I wanted to know why you asked a question like that. You shrugged and said nothing. It was as if, you too, shared my holistic consciousness, though I knew that to be impossible.

Therefore, I answered as truly as I could, that yes, I would grieve.

At night, when I went into your room to tuck you in, I found your eyes still haunted by the death of your much beloved grandmother. Young children should not be haunted by death, so I told you your story.

I started from the beginning, when your dad asked me the question, told you of the things I knew. It was here when your eyes grew bright and you asked me those questions about fire-spewing mutants. But I lied to you, for I told you that the ending of the story was not fixed, that I did not know the conclusion, when I already did. How could I have told you the conclusion?

Many times, I will wonder, if I had effectively sealed your fate by omitting the ending of the story I told you. Would you have acted any differently had you known what would happen? Was I effectively killing you by withholding the full truth from you?

It was a moral dilemma that had no answers, no right or wrong. Telling you the truth, I knew, would not spurn you from climbing, merely drive you to do it even more in the future, in order to prove me wrong.

But you had a right to know in any case, my heart argued softly, it was your life after all. Not so, I knew, for knowledge of one’s future is not a right, should not even have been even a possibility in the first place.

You had to make your own choices in life, choices based on your personal discretions, on what you feel or think. I can and will try to gently (maybe a tad forcibly at times) influence your decisions, but they are the influence any mother would want to exert on her daughter, and not the strong-arming of your daughter to do something she otherwise would not have done.

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