Planet Soul
How My 5-Year-Old Convinced Me Ghosts Are Real
My son’s reaction to Kobe Bryant’s death changed my perspective
I’m lying in bed with my five-year-old in his dark bedroom. It’s a typical night. I’m wedged up against the red plastic side of his race car bed, face down with my face squashed against a fuzzy Black Panther pillow.
My son is resting comfortably in the middle of the bed on his boring, non-fuzzy pillow. His legs splayed out and his arm draped across my back.
These are our traditional bedtime positions. All is going according to custom until he remembers the images of a crashed helicopter he saw on the television a half-hour before.
“You know, it’s okay,” he says into the darkness.
“What’s okay?” I reply.
“That basketball player who died.”
“Oh.”
“He’s a ghost now, but he can still have his basketball and dribble around.”
After five years of fairly death-free existence, death has swooped into my son’s world with an unexpected ferocity in the past couple of months. My father, his grandfather, died in December. The end was sudden and difficult, and more than anything, I dreaded having to tell my kids. Particularly my…
