Our 4 year old just asked us “Is that heaven”

Meltdown.  Our oldest was two steps away from a complete four-year old melt down in the back seat.  Silly us, we had changed the CD to something new and he really wanted to hear the ‘one with the singing’.  I started to explain to him that it was still singing, but then thought better of a crash course in logic with an ill tempered and irrational child.  Suddenly he stopped and asked “what’s that”?  Oh, it’s a cemetery, I responded, it’s where they bury the dead people.  “Is that heaven” he asked with a grin on his face and twinkle in his eye.

Well, judging from the look on his face he knows that heaven is nothing to be scared of.  However, driving in rush hour traffic wasn’t really the time that I thought I would explain death.  He already knows about pet death, but pet cemeteries aren’t something that you see every day.  However, if we did it’d be a safe bet that they’d be creepier and half of the residents would be named Fluffy or Spot.

My oldest son, for a moment thought that he was looking at heaven.  It was ridiculously sweet and was a genuine moment of insight going on in his head. It is a very pretty cemetery.

It’s one of the really old ones with folks from the Civil War, wrought iron chains and is a prominent stop on the local ghost tour.  True story: when I was traveling in the UK I met a girl who was supposedly majoring in gravestone etchings.  “What can you do with that degree?”, I asked her.  She said something about lost history, respecting our past and went to go speak to someone who full grasped her passion for gravestone etchings.

“No, that’s not heaven, buddy.  That’s the place where our bodies go when they die.  Our soul then goes to heaven.”, my budding inner clergy said.

“My body”?

I then tried to explain that all our bodies get older and that’s why it’s important to take care of it, exercise and eat the right foods.

By then though, he had remembered that he wanted to hear the French music instead of the Spanish music and asked if we were going to listen to this all day.  Kids understand and are more durable than we think and death is a complex thing to comprehend; even without factoring in the many different religious elements of it.

He’s grasped that our cats aren’t coming back.  Thankfully though he’s already let us know that ‘we need to get some new cats’.

We have a couple photos of mummies hanging up in the house.  What, doesn’t every house have some photos of mummies hanging up?  When I was traveling in Egypt and Peru I happened upon several locations that had mummies in museums, roadside museums or in dessert tombs. One day was especially awesome and those pictures are hanging up in the house.

“At least our son won’t have a fear of death”, my wife jokingly said when he was first born.

And now he’s seen heaven, at least the way that a four-year old might think of it.