Anna, her daddy, dogs, and her grief

As I've said numerous times before in the last year or two, Anna rarely says much about her dad--or at least very little that might be categorized as "grief" over his death or any questions. Unlike shortly after she turned four, she doesn't seem to be doing a lot of processing over death, his absence, or what it all means.

But every now and then she still surprises me with what comes out of her mouth.

Like last Monday evening. We had next to no food in the house--particularly nothing enticing for dinner--because (like always) I desperately needed to go grocery shopping but kept putting it off. I knew we weren't going to be home for dinner much during the week, and with vacation a week away I didn't want to leave food in the fridge to spoil or go to waste. So I resorted to digging in the freezer and winging it. Frozen chicken breasts, an orange bell pepper, a bit of leftover red onion, a mostly dead cucumber, and the last bits of our good ol' Kraft mac and cheese (ugh) from lunch. Anna'd be happy with the cucumber and mac and cheese, and I've gotten adept enough at grilling vegetables on our BBQ (thank you, grill basket and foil!)…but I'm stymied by cooking any meat other than hamburgers, chicken sausage, or the rare pork chop. And it's not just the BBQ--I don't really feel like I know how to cook most meat, period, whether indoors or out. So I don't. (We live on a lot of pasta, when I actually cook.)

Charley was the meat cooker. He'd grill some chicken on the barbecue while I'd do other dinner prep, and then we'd magically have tasty chicken to go with our pasta. I liked that system. And I remember going through a lot of chicken in a month. And steak during the summer.

I miss steak.

We received our barbecue as a wedding gift from my brother, and it saw a lot of regular use when Charley was alive. We had a covered front porch, so it was easy to grill said chicken year round without getting drenched. But the one time I tried barbecuing chicken breasts for my sister and I about a month or so after my wedding, it was a flaming disaster. They weren't chicken breasts; they were hockey pucks. And forever after that, I left chicken breasts (and the rest of the barbecuing) to Charley.

So as I was staring down the frozen chicken breasts on Monday night, I still had no idea how to cook them so they wouldn't become hockey pucks. I consulted the grilling cookbook or two that I have (which used to be Charley's, not mine), but they didn't give much guidance for Grilling Chicken Breasts for Dummies. So I called my brother-in-law, master griller…except he wasn't home, and my sister stood in the best she could.

Anna was at the dining room table playing while I talked on the phone, and she overheard me telling my sister I needed emergency help. I don't remember mentioning Charley's name in the context (unless it was merely saying that I hadn't tried to barbecue chicken since shortly after we got married, and she made the connection to Charley on her own), but Anna piped up as I continued talking.

"Yeah, and if Daddy was still here, he could cook the chicken for you!" she sing-songed.

Maybe I actually had just mentioned that Charley always cooked the chicken, or maybe I'd said it earlier when she asked why I was searching through the cookbooks. But I totally didn't expect that interjection from her then.

I laughed to myself and shook my head at her quip. "Yes, he could, and I'd love that!" I said back, and then resumed talking with my sister and trying to remember her instructions.

Fast-forward thirty minutes or so. We'd eaten outside on our patio table because the weather was so nice, and I had started taking the dishes back inside. (Well, my dishes and the serving pieces, anyway; Anna, the world's slowest eater, was still working on her plate of food.) I was either in the process of walking toward the screen door or opening it, but I saw Anna gesture something toward the sky and heard her say something. I couldn't really see her clearly, though, or hear what she said.

"What was that, honey?" I asked as I walked outside (and could then see her).

She half-laughed, perhaps with a hint of embarrassment. "I was just waving hi to Daddy."

You could have knocked me over with a feather. Two mentions of Charley in such a short period of time?

While she may occasionally interject something about her daddy if she hears me talking about him to someone else, there's little indication that she thinks of him in the here and now, in the context of our current lives. Plus, it always catches me by surprise when she refers to heaven and her dad, because I have definitely never, ever used the words or idea of "heaven" in conjunction with her dad's death. He was an atheist and didn't believe in it, in the first place, and he wouldn't be terribly pleased with her holding a Christian-flavored notion of it either. Plus, I don't really buy the idea of a heaven, where our departed loved ones watch us from on high or that we're reunited in some "other place" when Jesus comes. I was raised going to church so I suppose I always believed that idea, in some way…but after my husband died, a lot (most?) of my beliefs have changed quite radically. I have my own beliefs about spirituality and what might happen to us after we die, but it's not a heaven up in the clouds somewhere.

Anna first started mentioning heaven a couple of years ago--I don't remember when--but it certainly was while she was attending preschool. Christian preschools held at churches, I might add. Her teachers knew (more or less) that her father had died, and I imagine it was pretty automatic to include some idea of heaven if she mentioned her dead father. Plus, she couldn't help but pick up on the idea of it in popular culture, TV shows or movies, or just people in general. I could have crankily clobbered our hairdresser sometime in the last year for laying in to Anna once about her dad and heaven, while Anna's head was in the bowl (sink…whatever) and getting her hair washed before a haircut. It's not your place to try to tell her where her father is, I wanted to yell at her. And ESPECIALLY not when her dad would have disagreed with anything you say!

I've always liked to think that I controlled what Anna might think or believe about her father, while simultaneously honoring both what I believe and what her father believed. But nope. Apparently I can't do it in a vacuum, separate from what other people might tell her. (Which I already knew, obviously. I suppose I just find it annoying that she's absorbed an idea from other people that I never intended her to have. Sure, everybody has their own ideas and beliefs, and if it's what she wants to believe when she's older, then great. Fine and dandy with me. But I don't think an almost 7 year old can "know" an idea like heaven for herself yet…and I don't like that other people have influenced our own little reality of death and what I wanted my child to hear first from me. But oh well. It is what it is.)

I've always told her that no one knows what happens when someone dies and that people believe different things. But I've said she can always talk to her dad in her heart, or the cemetery, or wherever she is, and that he's always with her inside her heart. I tell her repeatedly and often how much her daddy loved her, how proud he was of her, and how much he still would be now. That we might, or will, see him again someday, that he's always watching: those ideas have never come out of my mouth.

Who knows what she's really absorbed from me, or if she "believes" them in any way. Maybe a heaven up in the sky is an easier concept for her to grasp when she's not quite seven. But regardless, I loved her simple gesture of waving to the sky and saying hi to Daddy--especially when it came basically out of nowhere.

Lordy, I love that child, in so many innumerable ways. It always warms my heart, helps me feel that I'm doing something right when she spontaneously or naturally mentions her dad. All she can have of him are the memories that I, and our family and friends, share about him…and if she can say something about him, then we've helped him to continue to live on in her life, however obliquely.

In contrast, though, she still frequently talks about our dog, Chase, too. (Ahem…our dog that died just over two years ago, if you didn't read my blog back then.) She'll mention him in passing, or laugh over stories with him, but she also has a slightly different reaction sometimes these days: if I talk about the dog to someone and she hears, she'll get what I call her "sad face" and she'll say it makes her sad to hear about Chase because she misses him.

It's fascinates me, in a way, how the reminder of him will make her sad. But it's always such a fine line between whether it actually makes her sad or if her face and reply are simply a learned reaction now. I think with her it's a bit of both. I think it does remind her that he's dead and she misses him, but she's a creature who falls into set habits and patterns so easily--for instance, she points out and corrects me virtually every time she sneezes and I don't immediately say "bless you" (which drives me batty, by the way)--that I think a small part of it is just her 'act' these days. You know, reinforced behavior and all that in kids….)

I also found in fascinating how she started thinking and talking about our dog even more than usual in early July. Without her consciously knowing or realizing that the second anniversary of his death was fast approaching, it was clear that her little body and mind 'remembered' the annual and seasonal clues. I can't remember what she specifically said or did in early July, but it was quite similar to what she did last year too, and I noted it.

But her "sad Chase face" has been triggered more and more of late, because of this little guy:



No, no, no: he's not ours. He's my sister and brother-in-law's new springer spaniel puppy, Buster. They got him on a whim one night in late June--their fifteenth wedding anniversary, no less--at their son's baseball practice. (Suckers! =)) He's totally cute…and totally a puppy with razor-sharp teeth.

There was more dog talk in general in my family right after they got Buster, which meant I was talking more about Chase since he's the only dog I've owned…which also meant that I saw Anna's sad face several times.

We also dog-sat the puppy for 4 to 5 days over the 4th of July weekend because my sister's son had a baseball tournament in Washington and dogs weren't allowed at the ball field. And because of his needle teeth, Anna was very nervous and scared around Buster when he'd try to play with her. One night he bit her on the meaty flesh on the inside of one knee while we were out whacking back a huge laurel bush in our backyard, and Anna promptly started weeping and wailing out of her fear and the pain. I was in the middle of some yard task where I couldn't stop immediately, so she went into her bedroom to cry, get away from the puppy, and wait for me. But before I could make it inside, she opened her window, amidst a fresh bout of tears.

"Mommy, I'm not just crying now because of Buster," she sniffled. "I'm crying because I miss Chase." And then she escalated to a new level of weeping and wailing.

It was the saddest little thing. I went inside and comforted her, held her as she wailed (because with her, there really is no description for it other than wailing). In her distress over the puppy's bite, apparently she'd pulled out the photo album of Chase that I'd made for her, and seeing photos of him set off her tears again.

I suppose I'm lucky that her tears and triggers and grief are just about the dog--and not her dad. I miss our dog at times, too, but mostly I'm just relieved to not have him anymore. He was a really good dog in so many ways…but when he went into crazy mode, he was an unpredictable loose cannon--a really strong, fast cannon that I couldn't physically restrain or control. I wish he hadn't died--and particularly not in such a horrific, awful way--but most especially I wish that Anna hadn't witnessed any of it.

But this grief and sadness and reaction that she has--even now, two years later--would be so much harder for me to bear if it was for her father, two years after his death. I was still such a relative mess at two years out that having to witness my daughter's pain and loss--which would have been heightened for her dad, I assume, compared to the dog--would have been excruciating.

I've always been relieved that she doesn't have a traditional grief, loss, or reaction to her dad's death. I wish she could remember him or could have known him as an older child, but all the same, it is easier that she has so little grief of her own about him.

It's an odd two-edged sword, though, especially when it's coupled with her sadness over our dog. I always wonder if some of her thoughts about her dad's death somehow get wrapped up in her grief over our dog. Part of her loss is coming to terms with the permanence of death, with always missing that person (or dog, as it may be) or becoming sad after certain triggers or reminders.

And whether it's dad, dog, or the cosmic nature of death in general, she still reacts periodically.




(P.S.: The chicken experiment on Monday night turned out awesome, by the way. The chicken was so juicy that I was paranoid it was undercooked and we'd end up with food poisoning--despite that its juices ran clear. It was just so weird to have juicy, nonovercooked chicken breasts. Anna loved the chicken (so long as it didn't have barbecue sauce on it, like mine did), and I was rather in shock that I didn't murder it. The grilled peppers and onions were delicious, too.

Who knew two years ago that I'd actually enjoy barbecuing? We've been doing it all week now too.

Go me. ;o))