to me, without flinching, you asked, Will I die? And as you said the words horror filled me as it had never before, tears burned my eyes, and instead of saying what I should have said, Not for a long, long time, or Not you my child, you alone will live forever, I said, simply, Yes. And because, no matter how you suffered, deep inside you were still an animal like any other who wants to live, feel the sun, and be free, you said, But I don’t want to die. The terrible injustice of it filled you. And you looked at me as if I were responsible.
You’d be surprised by how often in my little peripatetic wanderings through the valley of death I meet the child you once were. At first it surprised me, too, but soon I came to look forward to these encounters. I tried to think about why it was that you would appear like that when the subject had so little to do with you. I came to realize it had to do with certain feelings I felt for the first time when you were a child. I don’t know why Uri didn’t arouse the same feelings before you. Maybe I was caught up in other things when he was an infant, or maybe I was still too young. There were only three years between you, but in those years I grew up, my youth officially came to an end and I entered a new stage of life as a father and a man. By the time you were born I understood, in a way that I could not have with Uri, just what the birth of a child means. How he grows, and how his innocence is slowly ruined, how his features change forever the first time he feels shame, how he comes to learn the meaning of disappointment, of disgust. How a whole world is contained inside of him, and it was mine to lose. I felt powerless against these things. And of course you were a different kind of child than Uri. From the beginning you seemed to know things and to hold them against me. As if you somehow understood that built into raising a child are inevitable acts of violence against him. Looking down into the crib at your tiny face contorted by screams of grief—there is nothing else to call it, I’ve never heard any baby cry like you—I was guilty before I’d even begun. I know how this sounds; after all you were only a baby. But something about you attacked the weakest part of me, and I backed away.
Yes, you as you were then, with your fair hair before it turned coarse and dark. I’ve heard others say that when their children were born they tasted their own mortality for the first time. But it wasn’t that way for me. That isn’t the reason I find you hiding there in the shallows of my death. I was too caught up in myself, in the battles of my life, to notice the little winged messenger come to take the torch from my hand and silently pass it on to Uri and you. To notice that from that moment on I would no longer be the center of all things, the crucible where life, to keep itself alive, burns most vividly. The fire began to cool in me, but I didn’t notice. I carried on living as if it was life that needed me and not vice versa.
And yet you taught me something of death. Almost without my being aware of it, you smuggled the knowledge into me. Not long after you asked me whether you would die, I heard you talking aloud in the other room: When we die, you said, we’ll be hungry. A simple statement, and then you went on humming off-tune and pushing your little cars across the floor. But it stayed with me. It seemed to me that no one had ever summed up death quite like that: an unending state of longing with no hope of receiving. I was almost scared by the equanimity with which you faced something so abysmal. How you looked at it, turned it over in your mind as best you could, and found a form of clarity that allowed you to accept it. Maybe I am ascribing too much meaning to the words of a three-year-old. But however accidental, there was beauty in them: In life we sit