In the case of my grandfather, a man I never even knew, the stories have made him eternal. Image by Anastasia Higginbotham/The Feminist Press, © All Rights Reserved.īecause while death, the ultimate end, is inevitable, remembering lasts. In researcher George Bonnano’s The Other Side of Sadness, he finds that the people who weather the erratic ups and downs of grief the most gracefully are those that don’t shy away from having an ongoing relationship with the dead. It was just an instinct.Īs it turns out, it is a healthy one. I don’t think I even mentioned it to my mom, who missed him terribly. I used to pray to him while lying in my little canopy bed at night. He was a traveling salesman and once had my grandmother sew a collared shirt with Velcro along the seams so he could dramatically rip it off as he promised a potential client: “We’ll give you the shirts off of our backs!” He played football for the University of Nebraska and twisted the glass necks clean off of beer bottles when he didn’t realize they required an opener.
But he lived on in the epic stories I heard around the Thanksgiving dinner table. My maternal grandfather, Cork, he was called, died while my mother was pregnant with me. If you have questions for the one who died, ask them in your imagination or right out loud. Higginbotham, perhaps having experienced the inadequacies of adult explainers like Oma and me, advises her readers: I could tell it was part of her process for working out what this was all about. She asked to take a picture of the dead bird with my iPhone. If there was a spirit, where exactly was Oma purporting it might be hanging out? She wanted answers, not abstraction.
“Like over there?” Maya asked, pointing to the tall grasses just north of where we were huddled around the lifeless bird. “Some people think animals have spirits that can move outside of their bodies,” Oma tried to explain. When her Oma (grandmother) and I stumbled over our words, she wouldn’t move on. She squatted nearby, staring, for minute after minute after minute and demanded to know what happened. My two-year-old daughter Maya found a dead bird on the beach and became completely transfixed by it. You know, the ones we tell that we think somehow kids won’t interrogate even though we have every shred of evidence that they are intuitive sleuths from day frickin’ one.
Higginbotham, for example, warns her tiny readers: Thumbing through it, I was once again reminded of how dumb we are at a grief in this country, generally speaking, and how much we have to learn from even the most basic instincts of children. It’s a beautiful assemblage of a book - as if Romare Bearden himself rose from the dead and created a sequel to Alexander and the Terrible, Horrible, No Good, Very Bad Day. Or so says Anastasia Higginbotham, the author and illustrator of a new book for kids with that title.
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