My Son Described His Own Funeral And Then Asked For Toast

My son came into the world already knowing something the rest of us spend our lives trying not to think about. Before he had many words, before he could tell me he was hungry without pointing, he told me about his own funeral. He told it to me over breakfast, the way another little one might tell you about a dream, except he did not call it a dream. He called it before.

He said, before, I was in a long box, and everyone was sad, and there was singing. He said it plainly, mouth full, swinging his legs. I asked him what he meant, my heart going strange, and he said, when I was old, before I was little again. He said the box was lined with something soft and it smelled of flowers and there were too many flowers, he did not like so many flowers.

I told myself he had seen something, overheard something. But he kept adding pieces that no television gives you. He said his hands were folded on his chest and he did not like it because that was not how he slept. He said a man in dark clothes talked for a long time and got his stories a bit wrong. He said his mother was there. Not me. His other mother. He said her name was Elsie and she wore a blue coat and she was very old and she cried the most and he had wanted to tell her not to.

Elsie. He said it so easily. There is no Elsie anywhere in our family. He was so young that the idea of him inventing a whole grieving mother with a name and a blue coat seemed almost harder to believe than the alternative. He described her hands as spotty and thin. He described her crying into a cloth with a flower stitched on the corner. He said, I wanted to say, Mum, do not cry, I am only going to be little again.

That was the part that undid me. He was not frightened of any of it. He told me about lying in a coffin the way you would tell someone about a train journey. It was the most ordinary thing in the world to him, dying and coming back small. It was me who had to put down my cup and sit very still and remember to breathe. He noticed and patted my arm and, in the same breath in which he had just described his own burial, asked if he could have toast.

I gave him the toast. What else do you do. You butter the toast and you cut it into triangles because that is how he likes it and you try to keep your hands from shaking, and across the table this small person who claims to have been laid out in a box eats his breakfast and hums.

He is older now and he does not talk about it much anymore. It faded, the way these things seem to, as more of this life came in to fill him up. When I bring it up carefully he half remembers, like a place he used to know. But now and then he still says something that catches me. Last winter an old woman at the shops smiled at him and after we left he said she reminded him of Elsie, and then he said, I hope Elsie stopped being sad.

I hope so too. I have thought about her more than I can explain, this Elsie I have never met, this old woman who once wept over a body in a blue coat, not knowing, if any of it is real, that the person she was burying would come back and grow up two streets away in a life she would never see. I hope somebody dried her hands. I hope she got to be happy again before her own before.

I do not know what I believe. I only know my son told me about his funeral before he could tie his shoes, and asked for toast, and was not afraid, and that ever since then I have been a little less afraid myself.