Syd and me when she was about 13 Photo credit: Jon Aronin |
How did you get so capable, because when you were two, you needed me for everything?
How could you have needed me for everything, yet barged ahead anyway, my pigheaded angel-face, convinced that you needed me for nothing?
And how did you get so confident when there was a time that you worried about everything?
Remember that day on the bed? You said you were so afraid to die. I tried to think what could have made you that anxious. Then again, a lot had just gone down. There were stresses from school, your parents' divorce, unreliable friends, and missing your grandma. There was leaving childhood, leaving home, growing up, growing old.
No wonder you were frightened; you'd worried yourself full circle to confront your own mortality. And we went around and around and around, I trying to comfort you and you still not comforted.
Then I, who struggled to believe back then, said the last thing I could think of that might help: that after I died, I would watch over you, and that when you died, I would watch then, too, and fly down from Heaven just in time to catch your soul, that I would hold it tight against me and fly it up to Heaven.
Since none of my other "help" had helped, I expected you to scoff.
Instead, you said, "You promise?"
And I said, "I promise."