Talking until I’m Smurf Blue in the Face (from the Momplex Blog archive)

April 21, 2014February 27, 2023 JennyLeave a comment

I’ve watched a lot of Smurfs episodes over the last six or seven months — first, because I was pregnant, nauseated, and loathe to run around playing tag with my daughter, and now, because I’m constantly trying to come up with ways to keep her somewhat entertained while I nurse and coddle the sleepless, barfing changeling I spawned. We’re talking dozens of episodes, repeatedly. As someone who never got to watch Smurfs when I was a kid, I now want to formally thank my parents for not getting cable. Those topless little blue freaks are smurfing annoying.

Now that Smurfs are a part of my oldest’s obsessions, however, they are also a part of our bedtime ritual. I have to make up a story involving them every time I put her to bed. In fact, I have spent many lunchtimes pretending to be one or another of them, as well. Last year (and sometimes still) it was the Care Bears that permeated everything we did together. We’d be playing with her plastic zoo animals, and she’d hold up a wildebeast and an ostrich and say, “Let’s pretend this one’s Funshine, and this one’s Grumpy Bear.” And everything would just devolve from there.

Mostly, she wanted me to make Grumpy Bear do grumpy things. Though now that the Smurfs have edged out the Care Bears, she typically wants me to make Grouchy Smurf do grouchy things, like give other Smurfs shots. Sometimes I’m even asked to have Grouchy Smurf give Funshine Bear a shot, and it’s just so confusing. It’s like one big psychedelic trip into a four-year-old’s twisted imagination.

But I’ve noticed something about what the Smurfs and the Care Bears have done for us. They’ve given us an alternative means of communicating our deepest fears and grievances. While my daughter flagrantly uses them to play out her paralyzing fear of shots, I admit I have totally whored out Grumpy Bear to help my daughter understand ME. I sometimes make him seem like a beaten-down soul. When Smurfette gives Grumpy Bear a hug, he softens up a little and explains to her what a terrible day he’s had and how he’s just feeling grumpy because he’s so tired and gotten so run down by Funshine Bear’s incessant talking. Most of my snarky subtext goes over her head, and she gains a little empathy for crabby buttheads in the process, so it’s therapeutic for both of us.

I’m surprised these pretend-play games have done what they’ve done for our relationship, because I’ve otherwise concluded that words have almost zero impact on young children. I can tell my daughter that I love her a zillion times a day, and, God, how passionately I do, but my doing so does just about nothing to take the edge off the fact that I have barely spent a quality minute with her on days like today. And similarly, I can speak to my seven-week-old in the most adoring tone you can imagine, but we all know he could really give a shit what garble is coming out of that toothy hole in my face. He just wants it to shape itself into a smile. While I hold him. And hold him. And nurse him. And hold him. I can talk to him sweetly until I’m Smurf blue in the face, but it’s the caress he’s seeking, the nourishment, the human touch. My nearly five-year-old is not all that different.

Originally published 2009 JLF and the Momplex Blog

daughters · death · grandparents · Grief

A Good Death (from the Momplex Blog archives)

February 24, 2014February 27, 2023 Jenny9 Comments

It’s, what, maybe our fifth night at my grandpa’s apartment? I’m losing count now. We’ve been holding bedside vigil with him, all the women in the family, which is not a lot of women and yet nearly all of the family. My mom and her sister. My sister and me. Tonight there’s also my daughter. She’s only 10, but she asked to come. I wasn’t expecting this.

He doesn’t look like himself, I tell her. His mouth is open really wide—like this—and he’s gotten even thinner since you saw him on Thursday. She says she knows. She says okay. He’s gasping, and it sounds like he’s choking, I say. She just wants to give him a card she’s made. He won’t be able to see it, I say. You can tell I’m really scared. She has no idea what dying looks like. I’m just learning myself.

Of course, my dad has been coming and going. It’s “just” his father-in-law, but being that my dad’s own parents were killed in a car crash some 17 years ago, there’s a surrogate thing my grandpa wanted to do. Call me dad, Grandpa asked one day. And my dad obliged the man. This old man. This deaf old man. This man with finger joints thick as walnuts. This no-longer-towering man whose shoes I used to stand on to dance. Walk like a man, fast as I can, sang Frankie Valli. I can still see the hem of my grandpa’s pants swishing over his big Frankenstein shoes. I was so small. He was a giant.

As the giant shrinks, so does his world. Sure, he was always happy to see us, always greeted me with joy when his hunched-over body slowly climbed into my car. He always seemed tickled when he noticed, ten minutes into the drive, that the kids were in the backseat. “Oh, ho, ho!” he’d laugh. “Hello, little snipes!” But mostly he was staying home. Because it was hard to get to the bathroom. Because there were too many steps up to the restaurant. Because scooters don’t go over grass. Because it was too loud to hear. Because it was embarrassing. Because he was kind of tired.

“I’ve been sleeping all the time,” he told me just two weeks ago, when he happily agreed to go for coffee. It was the last time I saw him before he began this slow death. “Every chair I see looks comfortable, and then I sit in it, and it is.”

He’s gasping loudly in the bedroom, like he’s been doing for days. For the umpteenth time, I’m both surprised and secretly relieved he’s still alive when I walk into the apartment. My mom and aunt are playing cards in the front room, and the smell hits me in the face. It’s powerful, thick, and musky, a smell you stop noticing after just a few minutes, as I’m learning. I know it’s a smell that happens when old people want to live independently but barely can. But now I think it’s the smell of dying. I hate thinking that.

“Are you okay?” I ask my daughter. She nods, and we walk back to the bedroom. Great Grandpa doesn’t look like Great Grandpa anymore. I think it’s worse than she thought. But she’s okay. She wants to look, but she doesn’t want to look. She looks and looks away. I don’t know which one of us gives him her card. On the front she’s scrawled, “Get well soon!” But on the inside she’s written, “You’ve had a long life. I hope you enjoyed it!”

During the day, I’ll tell you we haven’t been sitting around crying and wiping our noses constantly. You can’t do that 24/7. Yes, we cry. But we also play card games and board games. We laugh and tell stories. Today my sister takes my daughter for a ride around the complex in his scooter. We time each other to see who can get from living room to fridge and back in the scooter in the shortest time. We eat junk food. But my favorite part is the singing. It’s my favorite because I think the rest might confuse my daughter, or maybe me. Of course, I want her to know it’s okay to be okay. I don’t want her to be devastated—and she isn’t—but I don’t want her to get too silly either. I’m not sure it’s the coping mechanism I want to model. That’s why I love the singing.

We gather around my grandpa’s bed, and we sing songs he loves, including “Me and Bobby McGee,” which sounds a lot different when you sing it to an old man who loved it, an old man who’s actively dying. My mom and aunt can sing in harmony. My daughter has a pretty little voice, and it’s coming at me from over my shoulder. I want to cry. We try to sing my grandpa’s favorite hymn, “Just a Closer Walk with Thee,” but we don’t know all the words. My sister looks them up on her iPod so we can sing along, and we do, but the last verse is missing. So, we try a different version, and when we sing the last verse, I see my grandpa’s face clench up a little:

When my feeble life is o’er,
Time for me will be no more,
Guide me gently, safely o’er
To Thy kingdom’s shore, to Thy shore.

The hospice nurses keep telling us it won’t be much longer, maybe today, maybe tonight. He hasn’t had any fluids or food for nearly a week. This is imminent, they say. But it never is. “It’s inhumane,” I told my mom when she asked me yesterday what I was thinking. “This is inhumane.” But now I know that every day has been for something. Every painfully long day that his tired old body has clung to life, has allowed us to do one more sacred thing before he goes. And another. And another. Today it was hearing my daughter sing to her dying great grandfather, to experience the beauty of all these strong women—I’ll count my little girl among them—carrying along a strong, sweet man through the tough work of dying.

After a week, my grandpa finally passed one evening with my mom and aunt at his side. He died with my daughter’s card in his hand, and after we washed his body and prepared it to go, my aunt returned the card to the same place. That’s an image I’ll never forget.