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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 sons who at ages five and eight are old enough to have some idea of what death means.
Despite my fears, after a very brief period of mourning — and I do mean very brief, as in hours not days — the kids bounced back. They coped in different ways, but my five-year-old dealt with his first brush with death by taking command of the situation.
He proclaimed right from the start that his grandad was now a ghost. There was to be no further debate on the matter. Others suggested heaven or maybe that Santa would bring Grandad back, but my five-year-old was adamant. He was a ghost. End of story.
About six weeks later, upon learning about the death of Kobe Bryant — a person he did not know or know of in any way — he remained consistent in his view on mortality. A death wasn’t something to be mourned, really, because the dead person simply had taken on another existence. A very pale and ephemeral one, but one where…
