And Life Comes Back: A Wife's Story of Love, Loss, and Hope Reclaimed (18 page)

“Boys, let’s play the rhyming game. I’ll say some words, and you tell me one that rhymes.”

“Okay. We’re ready.”

I tossed them an easy one. “Cat, bat.”

Tucker jumped in, “Cat in the hat.”

“Nice, Tuck! Okay. Here’s another one: star, jar.”

“Cat in the hat.”

Oh. So maybe that first right answer was a fluke. A shining moment where the right words accidentally fell into the right place.

“Well,
cat
and
hat
rhyme but not with
star
and
jar.
How about
cow
and
now
?”

Tuck tried again. “Cow in the hat.”

Tyler chimed in. “Cow on my nose.”

“Um, no. Let’s try a new one. I’ll say one word, and you tell me a word that sounds like it. Bug.”

“Nose.”

“Shoe.”

Oh, dear.

“Let’s try a new one. You give me a word, and I’ll tell you one that rhymes with it.”

“Okay, Mommy. Boat, nose, cat, show.”

“Can you pick one?”

“I did.”

So, maybe we’ll keep practicing. Apparently I had this coming straight at me. One of my mom’s favorite stories of my childhood is
when she tried this very same game with three-year-old me. I asked her to tell me a word that rhymes with
refrigerator.
Yep. I had this coming.

We drove the route to preschool, and the conversation unfolded with the scattered topics of their choosing. “Mommy, the sun is in outer space. And other planets too.”

“You’re right, Tuck. Lots of planets. Jupiter, Mars, Mercury, Saturn, Pluto …”

“Pluto?” They were thinking of a big, happy dog with a long, sloppy tongue.

“Yep, Pluto.”

Tyler, occasionally the voice of reason, warned us all, “But, Tucker, the sun can burn you. Don’t go there.”

“I still might like to go there,” Tuck said, glancing absently out the window of the minivan up into the sky.

“You know what, guys? When I was a little girl, my friends and I used to play spaceship on the swings on the playground. We would swing as high as we could, and we pretended to take off into outer space. Then we would slow down our swings, hop off, and pretend that we had landed on the sun. We hopped around in the grass, shouting, ‘Our shoes are burning! Our shoes are burning!’ And then we’d hop back on our spaceships and go back to Earth before we all melted to bits on the face of the sun.”

Their faces smiled gently at the idea of their mom as a little girl with an imagination.

“Did you really go, Mommy?” asked Tyler, ever unclear about that hazy line between reality and fantasy.

“No, buddy. We just pretended. We pretended to go up there to see all those planets.”

Tucker, still looking out the window, said, “God made all those planets.”

“He sure did. And he made you.”

“I can’t see God, Mommy. I’m looking all around, and I can’t see him.” Tuck waved his arms in his car seat, reaching for the invisible God.

“I know, kiddo. But he’s there. And if you ask him, he’ll come into your heart. And he’ll live there. He’ll help you to feel loved, and he’ll help you do the right thing, and he’ll listen to everything you say, and when you die, he’ll take you to heaven. Jesus is in my heart, and he’s in Daddy’s too.”

Tyler perked up. “But, Mommy, you didn’t die.”

“No, I didn’t. But someday I will. And when I do, I’ll go to heaven. Because I invited Jesus to live in my heart.”

Tyler wanted to talk all about heaven, so I told him the things I believe to be true: We’ll eat our favorite things. We’ll have a big party where we’ll sing and dance all night long. We’ll run and play together in wide open fields, as fast and as far as we want. And we’ll get to be with God every single day. In fact, he’s building a house for us to live in.

And then Tucker handed me some pretty important words.

With a faraway voice, he said, “Mommy, sometimes I don’t like this place at all. I really think heaven will be so much better. I just want to go there.”

I agreed with all my heart. And I asked him not to go without me. He squeezed my hand three times. I squeezed back twice.

Kindergarten parents are a community of their own, and in those weeks before Tucker started school, I joined the ranks. Kindergarten parents have lots of questions. Concerns. We need reassuring, to varying degrees. When I taught kindergarten, I often said that teaching this particular grade level was 50 percent teaching the children and 50 percent building relationships with the parents—with some give-and-take on either side of those percentages, depending on the day. It’s their child’s first exposure to school. It has to begin well. It just has to. If it doesn’t, it’s really hard to make up for lost time.

This week I sat among the other parents in Tucker’s class. I sat low on one of those teeny tiny chairs. I’d forgotten how small they really are. I listened to the other parents voice their concerns and questions:

“I know you don’t want toys at school, but could she bring her stuffed turtle? She really loves it. It makes her feel safe.”

“Can I send trail mix for him to munch on? It’s been his best snack since he was little.”

“He still naps in the afternoon. Will that be a problem in a full-day classroom?”

“Will you be able to put sunscreen on her before recess?”

These are legitimate questions. And basic conflict management teaches you that any emerging concern is valid. But as I listened, I couldn’t help but notice how different my life is. My worries are
different: “Hi, my name is Tricia. My son Tucker will be in your class. I need to tell you, my husband died very suddenly seven months ago. We’re still finding our balance. Tucker does well most of the time, but I wanted to alert you as you begin any learning units on family. Ours is different … very recently different.”

In the first weeks of school, Tucker brought an assignment home: complete a time line of your life story, with five pictures and simple captions. Now this is an excellent assignment. Brilliant, really. Personal, timely, and filled with learning objectives about self, milestones, and sequencing. They will hang their time lines in the hallway, and their oral presentations begin this week. (Why didn’t I do this when I was a teacher?)

Six years in five pictures. That’s a significant task, and it calls for some seriously careful selection. Here’s what we came up with:

Tucker was born.

Tucker became a big brother.

Our family went to Disney World.

Our family went to the mountains.

Tucker is in kindergarten.

And this brings us to today. We chose not to post Robb’s death as a milestone. Not because it isn’t one, but because there’s a lot more to Tucker’s daddy than the fact that he died too soon. Robb was in every picture except the current one; he was present for every milestone except Tucker starting kindergarten.

I asked Tucker, “What do you want to say if someone asks about Daddy?”

“Well, he’s not here anymore.”

“Oh, but he was here. And he’s still in our family. You can talk about him if you want to.”

Tucker smiled. “I will. He’s my dad.”

I don’t know if someone will ask. I don’t know if Tucker will choose to tell that part of the story. But I wanted him to know he could.

It’s his time line. His life’s story.

“If you could ride on a cloud, where would you go?” This question is posted on the door of the Pre-K classroom. The children’s answers are quoted underneath.

“I would go to Grandma’s house.”—Jayden

“I would go to Disneyland.”—Zach

“I would go to the zoo.”—Amanda

And then there’s this one:

“I would take my mom and Tuck, and we would go to the kingdom of God for a visit with my daddy.”—Tyler

I can’t say I use the phrase
kingdom of God
very often (or ever, really), but we talk about heaven a lot. It’s a very real—longed for—place for us. My children are perhaps more comfortable than you are with the word
died.
It’s because I taught them to say it. Any other word is intangible.
Passed away
is a gentle phrase that really means nothing to me.

This isn’t only my story. It’s theirs. Their daddy died. And if I don’t give them words to talk about it, then they won’t know how to say it. It’s part of my job as a widowed, single mom to teach them the skills to tell what happened, to tell their story, to tell the truth.

I read that question on the wall, and I thought,
Goal accomplished. My little boy can tell his story.
Other children make plans to go to Grandma’s, Disneyland, or the zoo. We make those plans too. But Tyler’s not afraid to toss heaven onto the list. “My daddy is there.”

As a bonus, I appreciate that he wants to take Tuck and me with him.

Tonight I was stirring spaghetti sauce, the one dish that works for all three of us. I reached into the drawer to grab a trivet, and my memory played out almost as Robb had said it would. Except I didn’t smile. He was wrong about that part. Okay, I smiled a little. The gentle, missing-him kind. I stood very still, holding the trivet in my hands, remembering his voice in my head. There are a million things to miss, and when I think I have a handle on one facet of this process, another one smacks me in the face, kicks me in the shins, knocks the wind out of me, or sneaks in a physical assault that I didn’t see coming. This time with a trivet, of all things.

I remembered standing in this same place several years ago. I was working quickly to fry some chicken for three hungry men, varying in size but comparable in appetites. I even recall these wise words from Robb: “Babe, slow down. You might forget something.”

By “something” I’m pretty sure he was referring to the oil I should
have put in the pan
before
I heated it to atrocious degrees. Instead, I simply heated the pan. Searing hot metal, on my stovetop, without a single thing in it. That’s a smoke alarm waiting to sound. So then, when I needed to fry the chicken patties in the horrifically hot pan, I poured in the necessary oil … and flames instantly shot up to the ceiling.

I have learned a few lessons from this encounter with olive oil on hot metal. It turns out, a grease fire will not burn itself out. So waiting for it to stop burning on its own will merely fill the kitchen with black smoke. And cause significant damage to the cupboards and the microwave. And we now know the firemen aren’t kidding: water does not put out a grease fire. Only a lid on the flame to suffocate it. I tried water first. Not wise.

And, in case you’ve wondered, burned hair is one of the worst smells in the history of mankind.

And aloe is a good cure for burns to the fingers and wrist from carrying a wildly flaming pan across the kitchen and leaning over it to turn on the water, which did not in fact help the situation. Thank you, aloe. You have been my friend through many a sunburn and now a kitchen disaster.

And children who witness a direct encounter with open flames in the kitchen (however, from a safe distance) will require many, many, many therapeutic conversations about the safety of the house, the kitchen, and future meals. The older child is likely to tell his entire new community of preschoolers about the smoke alarms we still hear in our minds.