Contemplating life and death with a 6-year-old at bedtime

Jun. 12—I leaned in to give Arlie her goodnight kiss, eager to be done with our too-long bedtime ritual so that I could spend a bit of time with my wife before inevitably falling asleep in the living room from exhaustion.

That's when she whispered the horrible thing.

"I think Granddaddy's going to die first."

I pulled back, my face transforming from the pre-kiss pucker to wide-eyed surprise as I processed my 6-year-old's unprompted declaration that she believed my father, youthful still at (almost) 67, would be the next in the ground.

My initial vocal reaction at this morbid prediction was, admittedly, probably not the one most of us would have made:

"Well, don't tell him that," I said. And, yes, I am aware of the hypocrisy in instructing my daughter to avoid notifying her grandfather of her dire prognostication and then writing a column, which he will certainly read, about that very thing less than a week later. Keep your snark in-pocket; I've got enough, thank you very much.

My second attempt at a response was more appropriate.

"Why do you think that?"

My child, cocksure in her belief that she knows far more than anyone else in the universe, looked at me as if I'd asked her the dumbest question ... "What's the square root of giraffes?" or something equally inane.

"Because he's the oldest, Daddy," she said, her handle for me given the same emphasis you might place upon the word "moron."

She wasn't wrong. As far as her immediate family goes, I believe my father might be the oldest, or at least close to it. And, of course, in a child's mind, the older someone gets, the more likely they are to kick the farm.

But I also vividly recall a recent conversation with the kid in which I had to set her straight about how, although I'll be in my early 50s when she's old enough to drive, I will not, in fact, be retired and therefore left with nothing to do but cater to her every whim. Seems to me, Arlie's concepts of time and age are somewhat askew.

"Well, sometimes younger people die first," I told her.

This news was met with a look of confusion.

"But Grandma died, and she was old," she told me. That would be Ruth Ann Wilcox, my grandmother on my mother's side, who passed in 2020 and is probably the only significant non-animal death Arlie actually remembers. Grandma was 93, which likely qualifies as "old" by most metrics.

"That's true," I said, very much wishing to escape this macabre conversation. "But one of your other grandmas, Shelia, died right before you were born, and she was very young."

That was a reference to Mandy's stepmother, who died suddenly at 53, after Arlie's conception but before she'd actually emerged into this world to bombard her beleaguered father with questions about mortality.

"So it's not always about age," I told Arlie. "People can die at any time."

Arlie, for once, ceased briefly in her questioning ... I assume to consider what I'd told her. I stood by patiently, listening to the ebb and flow of the "ocean" from the sound machine on her bookshelf.

After a time, she whispered another horrifying thing.

"Even kids?"

I took a deep breath.

"Yeah," I said. "Even kids."

"Oh," Arlie said, then fell silent again.

I reached over to her, curled beneath the covers and surrounded by a mountain range of stuffed toys she'd accrued during her few short years, and grabbed her tiny hand, same as I did just seconds after she came into this world. In the dark of her room, we listened as simulated waves crashed against rocks that never existed.

ADAM ARMOUR is the news editor for the Daily Journal and former general manager of The Itawamba County Times. You may reach him via his Twitter handle, @admarmr.