It always seems like the two hard things to talk about with my kids will be sex and the deaths of those close to them, but really, so far, the thing that I have the hardest time with is subjects of sheer human brutality and tragedy. Things like explaining why I was so upset when my cousin Jane was murdered, or what suicide is, or answering questions about the holocaust, or 9/11.
That last one comes up every year in September, because now they learn about it in school as part of Social Studies. I get why they are learning about it, but my kids speak very nonchalantly about it, as if I were speaking about, say, Pearl Harbor. Honestly, it rubs me the wrong way. They see the footage of the plane crashing into the building in class, and they have questions that definitely linger for weeks after, that they proceed to bring up at the worst times, like when I am trying to have a margarita and eat a taco.
And so whenever the subject comes up, I try to answer their questions honestly, and in an age-appropriate way, which at their ages is getting to the point where they can hear (and have heard) just about all of it. But damn, when they ask those really specific questions:
“Did they find the bodies?”
“How many planes were there?”
“Did the bodies burn?”
“Did babies die? Did kids die?”
“Did people on the ground outside the buildings die?”
“Why did that one plane crash in the field?”
“Wait, there was one in Washington, DC, too?”
“Did people really jump out of the buildings?”
“Who were the people in the planes?”
And the most daunting question of all, “Why did they do it?”
Well, I usually get choked up and can barely talk, and have to really physically control myself to try and explain it. But they learn about it as part of history in school, so I feel like I have to be honest about it. Tonight i told them a lot more about it than I have before, mostly because they had way more questions, and they also had heard some stuff that was patently incorrect, and I felt it was my duty to set them straight. So, tonight, I tried to explain what it was like on that day, at least what it was like from my perspective, and how, in retrospect, we know what happened, but in real time, things were very confused, horrifying, and scary, and people were a little panicked in general, even outside of NYC and DC. I tried to explain how getting on a plane with my sister the first day they resumed flights again felt like a heroic act. I told them about the soldiers at the airport with machine guns, and other people at the airport handing out little American flags to people getting on the flights. Rollie asked why I didn’t keep mine, and I honestly don’t know, because normally I would keep something like that, but I tried to explain how everything felt uncertain and surreal, and people were in shock for days and weeks after. It just didn’t occur to me. He’s right – I should have kept it.
And it kind of sucked, because their questions now are pretty logical, and I could see the little gears churning in their mind as they asked a question and got an answer and they came to the same realizations that slowly dawned on all of us that day.
One important thing, though, is that i think I got the message across to them that for people who were alive then, it is difficult enough to talk about, but that they really need to be respectful when discussing it, because you never know if the person you were talking to might have been there that day, or lost someone close to them.
And then R. proceeded to tell me about a school friend whose Grandfather worked at the Twin Towers and that morning, Grandpa went out for a smoke break and feels that smoking that cigarette saved his life, and so he will never quit smoking. And that actually made me laugh and cry at the same time, and I said, “You know what, Rollie? I don’t blame him.”
There is not really a point here, except that I wish I had a dollar for every time I tried to enjoy a margarita over dinner and my kids asked me really hard questions and made me cry over the absolute beauty and exquisite pain of being a human.
