part of why i’m not sure if i want to have children
As the two-year mark of my father’s death approaches, I have Joan Didion’s new memoir to look forward to. The Year of Magical Thinking helped me so much, although her sorrow was so spare and sharp, while mine raged and drifted like a current. Via New York Magazine:
The ways in which neither we nor they can bear to contemplate the death or the illness or even the aging of the other. As the pages progressed it occurred to me that their actual subject was not children after all, at least not children per se, at least not children qua children: their actual subject was this refusal even to engage in such contemplation, this failure to confront the certainties of aging, illness, death. This fear. Only as the pages progressed further did I understand that the two subjects were the same. When we talk about mortality we are talking about our children. - Joan Didion, Blue Nights
After reading that excerpt, I was nagged by having read or watched something similar recently, that struck a chord. Then I realized it was from watching the movie version of Stephen King’s “Christine” (directed by John Carpenter). The protagonist, a troubled, nerdy teen says:
I think that part of being a parent is trying to kill your kids…Because as soon as you have a kid, you know for sure that you’re going to die. When you have a kid, you see your own gravestone….If being a kid is about learning how to live, then being a grown-up is about learning how to die.
