Conversations

At this time in my life, I live with my oldest son, his girlfriend, and her 5-year old daughter. They are expecting a child in December, so we will really have a full house. We have not lived here a month yet, and already we have adopted two more kittens, Simon and Spike/Clyde, that my cat Sasha detests with a passion. She is no longer hiding under the bed (not even my bed!), but she hisses and growls at them on every occasion. They are cute, and ignore Sasha most of the time. My little friend, the 5-year-old, we'll call her little Girl for now, well, we have some interesting discussions.

Just the other day, we were sitting on the front porch, and she looked at me and said, "You have to move, you are sitting in my grave." Of course, this this took me by surprise, and, even knowing I was not sitting in a grave, (I was sitting in a chair on the front porch) I jumped up. I said, "What? What do you mean a grave? Who died?" She looked at me solemnly and said, "Big brother died." (She has no big brother. He is imaginary.) I said, "Well, Jesus, I didn't even know he was sick. What killed him?" She replied,"He got shot by some guys in a car." At this point, I am thinking about psychology and what has happened to her to make her have these ideas. Then she said, "But I'm going to make him alive again. We have to do this thing where we give the demon something and then he gets to come back cause he won't be a demon anymore, and will let him go." I thought about this for a minute, thinking hard about the word demon. So big brother died and became a demon. This isn't looking good from where I sit.  I said, (what else)?, "OK. What do we do?" So we held hands and she said some words from a language that has never been used on this earth anywhere, and she pointed to her right, and said, "Here he is, good again, right here." So I looked at the empty space and said, "Well, hey there, glad you're feeling better, or, I mean I'm glad you are not dead anymore." I really didn't know what to say, actually.

I asked her why she was thinking about all of this dying business. She told me she watched Supernatural with her mom and that is what happened to one of the characters. OK, now I feel a lot better. I then said, "You know you can't really bring people back who are dead, right?" She nodded her head, and said, "Like Grandma?" And I said "Right. We miss them and we can talk to them, if we want, and visit them and put flowers on their graves." She nodded her head, and then she looked at me, a little puzzled. "Grandma's in Newport News. That is not here." I said, "Well, we can get in the car and drive down the road here, and then turn, and find our way to Newport News, and the cemetery, and you can talk to your Grandma." And she looked at me, even more puzzled, and with the air of someone who is talking to a lunatic, and said, "I can't talk to Grandma, she's dead."

Now, what do you say to that?