To give you widow/ers with young kids some hope….

"What are you doing, Mom? I thought you were putting your computer away so we can go!"

Anna and I are getting ready to make a short trip to southern Oregon, since it's spring break and we haven't been down there since Labor Day weekend last September. In true lackadaisical/procrastinator's fashion, I originally intended to leave yesterday afternoon after Anna got done with a friend's birthday party, but I was still rather wiped out after a busy week spent at the dance team's final State competition and instead opted to take it easy last night and leave today.

But I had a few last-minute things to take care of before we left…like paying the annual premiums for our life insurance policies, which are due this coming week.

Yes, you read correctly: our life insurance policies…meaning mine, and Anna's too.

Yes, I have a life insurance policy on my child. Maybe a little morbid and macabre, but seeing as I'd lose Social Security if anything happened to her, I figured three years ago that I'd better protect myself and my sanity (and give myself some time to grieve before having to get a job for income and survival's sake), just in case lightning struck again.

So I pulled out my computer to pay the life insurance bills online before packing everything up and loading the car. And Anna's innocent question about what I was doing somehow led to a conversation with her, again, about what insurance is--and what life insurance in particular is for--and even more unexpectedly, a conversation about how her dad died.

She's known the details for years…or at least as much as any little kid can. And it's astonishing how much she remembers…and also how her mind can warp things a little as she matures, grows, and is able to conceptualize and understand her dad's death a little bit more.

Anna still rarely talks about her dad or his death. Other than when she was 4 years old and asked a lot of questions and did a lot of processing in December 2008 through the spring of 2009, you wouldn't really know she has a dead father. She may mention Daddy from time to time, but only rarely and always in passing. And for almost two years now, any "grief" for her dad or processing she needed to do has been usurped by the death of our dog.

She still talks about Chase all the time, will draw him in pictures when she draws our family…and her dad is never in them. Mom, Anna, Rosie (our cat), and Chase: that's "our family." She might add her dad if I mention him, but I generally don't even say anything anymore. She still mentions quite regularly that she misses Chase and that it makes her sad sometimes. I'll periodically find the photo album of Chase in random places around the house--the living room couch, her bedside table, the table in the playroom: evidence that she'd been thinking of the dog and wanted to "see" him again.

Always the dog…never her dad. It used to annoy me, somehow, but now I've simply gotten used to it. She remembers her dog, saw his death, and felt his absence from her life. Her father, in contrast, is mostly a fictional person to her. She can't remember anything about him, since she was only 10 months old when he died, and all she's ever known is her life with only me. While it's a comfort that she doesn't really have any grief of her own (yet?) over her dad's death, it also makes me somewhat sad for her dad, too, that his absence has so little impact on her day-to-day life. Talk about a catch-22.

So when she does start talking about her dad and asking new questions again about how he died, it's a bit unexpected…as it was this afternoon.

And yet there I was, not even an hour ago, having to explain in more detail just how the accident happened, explaining (defending?) how he couldn't have seen the pole even if he'd looked, demonstrating how he hit the pole.

The explanations were still pretty basic and simplistic…but for the first time, I found myself actually showing her how things happened, to help her understand. I had her stand right behind me and asked her if she could see my computer on the kitchen counter just ahead and to the right of us; I could see it, but with her immediately behind me, I blocked her view and she, of course, couldn't see it.

"That's why Daddy couldn't see the pole either," I explained to her. "He was right behind the cyclist in front of him and he couldn't see around him and see the pole. Now step to the side." Anna took a step to the right, and confirmed that she could see my computer then. "But Daddy was going so fast and pulled out so close to the pole that he didn't have time to do anything. He hit it within a foot."

I even reached over and pulled out the ruler that I have sitting in a can on my kitchen counter, to illustrate the point. I put the ruler against the edge of the counter. "See? That's how far Daddy was from the pole when he pulled out and hit it. He was going as fast as cars go when we drive on the street in front of our house, and he didn't have time to do anything before he hit it."

"But how did he die?" Anna asked too (except I think she originally phrased it, Why did Daddy die?, and I had to extract that she meant how). And that question led me to demonstrating against the sliding glass door--because it was the closest flat, hard, vertical surface--how his front tire, then his handlebars, and then the top of his head hit the pole, as momentum and sheer physics threw him forward over his bike. "And it hurt his brain so badly that it killed him," I finished, any further words eluding me.

I couldn't have explained anything more if I'd wanted, because I still can't conceive and understand how the impact could have killed him instantly--even with two years of biology and anatomy courses in college and having read Charley's autopsy report several times. Multiple skull fractures, I can understand...but subarachnoid hemorrhage, subdural hematoma, and LeFort facial fracture mean little to me, except I know they were really, really bad and helped explain what he looked like when I viewed his body two days after he died. I still can't intellectually grasp how he could die in a split-second, be dead before he even hit the ground…and I have no way to explain it to our six-year-old daughter.

But the conversation and reenactments originally started around me explaining what life insurance is. I've told her once or twice over the last few months what life insurance is, that we had some on Daddy and thus got some money when he died, enough that I could stay home with her and not work for a few years. (The conversations about life insurance originally started in January after I started my photography business and had to explain to her why I was "on my computer all the time" [her words/lament] and how it's because of something called work and money and income…which are mostly foreign terms to her, since she's never really seen me go to work. She remembers when I worked for my brother two years ago, but the whole concept is still pretty new to her.)

So today's Topic of the Moment was a brief refresh on life insurance. She remembered that Daddy had some, and I told her I had a policy too, just in case anything happened to me and I died. (I wisely kept silent that I have a policy on her too. What six-year-old kid needs to even hear a hint of their own death?) I told her the money from my policy would go to the person who'd take care of her--my middle sister--if I died.

Amusingly, she thought it'd be pretty cool to go live with her Aunt Cindi if anything happened to me. "What? Really?" she exclaimed. "Then she'd have THREE kids!" That I wouldn't be there anymore didn't really register…but our cat's fate did, as she started to postulate where Rosie would go. She got as far as realizing that, if I died and wasn't here, Rosie would need to go somewhere, but she couldn't quite figure out if Rosie would then go to Aunt Cindi's with her.

"Yeah, but it wouldn't really happen," she immediately decided.

"No, you're right," I affirmed. "Most people die when they're older, but everyone has to die sometime." (I think it was somewhere around here in the conversation that she started asking about her dad and how he'd actually died, how the crash happened.)

"But you have to be old to die," she puzzled a few minutes later, after we'd talked/acted out how her dad died. I could practically see the gears in her head turning, as she tried to grasp all the threads of our conversation. She started playing with the pink balloon she'd brought with her to the dining room, holding it over the furnace vent as the warm air blew out.

"Most people are older when they die," I replied, reaching for a good--but not dismissive or untrue--answer. "But kids can get sick with cancer, or die in an accident. And people who aren't old can get sick or die too. Everyone has to die someday; it's just a fact of life."

"But why?" she asked. The balloon caught the air draft from the furnace vent and floated on its own, staying in place. Anna laughed again at its "magical" abilities to stay aloft, as she's done a dozen times or more with the balloon and the vent.

"It's just how things work. Your cells just get old and can't work as well, and eventually your body shuts down, and you die. No one can live forever--not even animals, or plants, or trees.

"Have you ever seen someone who's 300 years old?" I dropped my voice and stretched my face to exaggerate how silly it'd be to be 300 years old.

Anna giggled. "No."

She grabbed the balloon as the air from the furnace turned off, her attention already going elsewhere, ready to bounce off to the next thing that would catch a 6 1/2-year-old girl's interest.

"Dying doesn't sound very fun," she declared as she stood up.

"Nope, it doesn't really," I answered.

And then she bounded off to the playroom, and that was the end of that.

And what I meant when I said in the post title, to give some of you widows and widowers hope: By some miracle--or more accurately, as a sign of my own healing over the years--the conversation was no weightier or more emotional for me than any that Anna and I have on other days…ones where I explain how you make applesauce, apple juice, watermelons, etc., etc., or where fog, snow, or dew come from.

That these conversations are so commonplace and unremarkable now is astonishing to me…because they certainly weren't easy or reaction-free several years ago. But as my own grief has lessened (and mostly gone into remission) over the years, answering Anna's questions about death and her dad--or about life insurance--has become easier. For one thing, I've had lots of practice with them over the last three to four years.

And today's conversation was just another totally normal moment in our lives, despite the abnormality of our family's story and the death of her father. And while the conversation itself had little effect on me as we had it, I still couldn't let it pass without recording it…for Anna's benefit someday, for my own, or else for the other young widows and widowers on this path with me, who wonder if they'll ever be able to talk to their kids about their parent's death without becoming shattered.

It is possible….