Two Plus Two Doesn't Always Equal Four

A dear, sweet old man we've known for a lot of years passed away last week. Today was his memorial service and my two youngest sons had a lot of questions. Mostly they wanted to know what he'd died from. I explained that he died because he was old. "But what did he die from?" So I explained that two months ago he had a heart attack and because he was old and his heart had been working for a lot of years (85, I think), it just couldn't recover from the heart attack. Both of my sons, independent of each other and at separate times, said: "Well, is Grandpa going to die? He had a heart attack; is he going to die?" Two days after Thanksgiving my Dad had a little scare---a "small" heart attack and is now doing excellently. But my kids did the math and figured out that two months was coming up and did that mean that Grandpa was going to die too?

It made me realize how many times kids have to struggle to come up with answers to big huge questions. They don't always ask these questions and so often get the answers wrong inside their own little minds and garnered from their tiny spheres of experience. I can remember as a kid coming to some erroneous conclusion about something---it made perfect sense to me at the time and seemed to be the only obvious answer. It would sometimes be years before somehow the true answer or correct reality would inadvertantly become clear and I'd realize---aha! I've always assumed X but Y is really true.

So....I hope my kids keep asking questions. Better to hear something painful or even to hear, "You know, I'm not sure about that" than to come up with something completely off-base and off-track and then live with unfounded fears and misconceptions for years.

Poor babies.