Leslie Haynsworth’s work has previously appeared in Fourth Genre, The Common Review, JuiceBox: A Journal of the Ordinary, Marie Claire, and elsewhere.  She lives in Columbia, SC.

Haynesworth says: "This piece was inspired in what I’m sure are pretty obvious ways by my son Adam.  I assume my fascination with what’s going on in Adam’s mind as he learns to cope with life’s various challenges is also readily apparent.   I hope I also managed to convey how in awe I am of the fierceness of his curiosity and his zest for life."

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Adam, God, John Kerry and Me

by Leslie Haynsworth

If our dog Angus had died sooner, like he was supposed to, it would have been easier.  Adam might not really have noticed.  And even if he had noticed, Angus’s disappearance would have just been one more of the hundreds of random, inexplicable things that happened to Adam, things Adam simply had to accept as being beyond his ken.  But Angus waited to die until Adam was three.  So we were going to have to explain it. 

     Angus had cancer, lymphoma, and by the time they found it, it was already incurable, stage five.  No one expected the chemotherapy treatments to help, really, but somehow they did, and after a while my husband Neville and I allowed ourselves to be lulled into believing we could defer Angus’s death almost indefinitely as long as we were willing to keep writing those $100-plus weekly checks to the vet.  It wasn’t until twenty months later that the blood test results finally came back worse than they should have, and then even worse the next week.  The vet said there was one last set of treatments we could try, but that even at best we were looking at a couple of months now.

     We didn’t know what Adam did or didn’t understand about death.  He was always surprising us in both directions, knowing more than we’d have expected him to about some things and much less than you’d think about others.  He’d come home from school saying he wanted to be a paleontologist (and pronouncing it right, too), but he could never manage to count to twenty without omitting the numbers 13 and 16.  What we did know was that Adam didn’t seem to like Angus very much.  Angus was big and old and sick, and Adam was young and small and frenetic.  The two of them had never shared the same space all that well.  But Angus had been kind to Adam, remarkably kind, really, in light of all the ear-pulling and chew-toy-stealing he’d had to put up with.  More than that, he’d simply been there.  Eighty pounds of him, shedding, scratching, snorting, sighing, smelling.  Adam wasn’t just going to not notice when he disappeared.

     So what were we going to tell him?

At first it seemed that the explanation I chose to go with was such a good one that Adam was just going to swallow it whole, no fuss, yeah, the dog’s dead, okay, whatever, why would I be upset, Mama, when Angus gets to go live with God now?  That’s what I had decided to tell him.  Of all the suggestions I’d gotten it had made the most sense, seemed most in keeping with both Adam’s way of ordering the universe and my own.  “You don’t sugar-coat it,” said Marcia, the director of Adam’s daycare.  “You don’t start talking about dog-angels flying around in the sky looking down on us or anything like that.  Children need us to be honest about the fact that death isn’t easy for us to deal with.  But you can and should still offer him the comfort that your dog is with God.”   I liked that approach because it was neither too saccharine nor too terrifyingly blunt:  it allowed us to address the fact that Angus was going to be forever gone from our lives in such a way that Adam wouldn’t feel lied to, betrayed or overprotected when he got old enough to understand death better, but it didn’t push Adam in the direction of having to confront harsh truths that were so far beyond his control that there was really no point in forcing him to confront them:  Angus is in a hole in the ground in the backyard now and he can’t get out.

     Besides, who knew?  Maybe Angus really would be with God.  If there is a God, surely he would want to hang out with Angus, who was a really great dog.  And you’ve got to figure that if God wanted to hang out with Angus, he could make it happen.  Besides, Adam liked God.  He seemed to like God a lot more than he liked Angus.  He had recently started, under the influence of two kind of evangelical daycare teachers, to talk about God a lot and to draw cryptic pictures of obscurish Biblical figures like the Apostle Simon.  So I was pretty sure that if Adam knew God wanted Angus, that would be okay with him.

     Then one Saturday afternoon, Angus fell down in the backyard and couldn’t get up.  We took him to the emergency vet, but after extensive testing all they could tell us was that he was partially paralyzed and probably wasn’t going to get better.  And we could see that he was miserable, frightened and in pain.  Early Monday morning, I had a long talk with the vet who’d been treating the cancer.  He’d just visited Angus in the hospital and didn’t think there was anything more we could do.  We arranged an appointment to meet at the hospital that afternoon to put Angus to sleep.

     So by the time I drove Adam and his little brother to daycare Monday morning, I knew Angus wasn’t coming home.  And when Adam, who despite his avowed lack of interest in having Angus around, seemed to find it odd not to have him around, asked when Angus was getting back from the hospital, I tried to explain it to him:  Angus isn’t coming back to our house anymore; he’s going to live with God now.  And Adam said okay, and then he said, Mama, when I get home from school today, I want to watch the monster truck video.

     Over the next few days, I talked to Adam about it some more.  Choosing my moments carefully, I’d remind him that Angus was with God now, try to explain as gently but truthfully as I could why that was (Angus was very sick; Angus died), and ask him if he understood.  He always said that he did, and he always sounded bored by the whole issue, not interested in taking the conversation any further than I was going to make him take it.

     So Adam was fine, obviously.  Angus was gone, but that was okay.  Angus was living with God now, and that was for the best.

     But then, about a week after we’d buried Angus (in the backyard at night, with my mother-in-law distracting the boys with videos and treats), Adam asked, with some impatience, when Angus was coming back from being with God.  We explained that he wasn’t coming back, that he had died, and that when people died, they went to live with God.  Adam said, Oh, and changed the subject.  And then a couple days later, he asked again:  But, Mama, when is Angus coming home from living with God?  I tried to explain again, and again he seemed to understand.  But still, he kept asking:  when is Angus coming back? Why does he have to live with God?  And then one day in the car, he asked again, and again I explained it:  Angus can’t come back to our house, he has to stay with God now. 

     And Adam was quiet for a minute, and then he said, “God is very nice, and he would never shoot anybody.”

That was the last time Adam asked us when we were getting Angus back from God.  It was as if he’d finally attained a kind of resolution on the issue:  God is very nice, so nice that he would never shoot anybody, no matter how provoked, so even if we can’t have Angus back, I know he’s in good hands. 

     But while I was using God as a way to help Adam cope with Angus’s death, Adam had apparently used Angus’s death as a means to a new understanding of God.  That was the point at which God became Adam’s moral exemplar, the embodiment of what he understood to be right and good.  Adam had, at about that time, become fascinated with guns.  We’d had to have a lot of talks about why guns weren’t so great and why it really wasn’t nice to shoot people, no matter how much you may have felt they deserved it.  So when Adam equated God’s generic niceness, which he’d heard so much about at school, with the very specific kind of niceness that’s exemplified in not shooting anyone, even when you really want to, it was clear that he had made a connection:  if you want to be nice like God, you can’t shoot people.

     God wasn’t actually Adam’s first moral exemplar.  About a year earlier, he’d gotten very caught up in the presidential election, and taken a great interest in the two candidates, whom he called John Kerry and John Bush.  That summer at a friend’s birthday party, he was given an American flag as a party favor.  He named the flag John Kerry and played with it until it fell apart, at which point, he began calling all flags John Kerry, all the while plainly understanding that the name John Kerry was also the signifier of an actual person whom he excitedly recognized every time he saw him on TV.  Here in South Carolina, neither party bothered to advertise, since everyone knew from the start that we were going to go for Bush.  But at least to one small boy, the Democrats were nevertheless getting their message across perfectly:  John Kerry is the human embodiment of all that the flag stands for.

     After the election, when Kerry’s name and face quickly started fading from view, Neville and I figured Adam would lose interest in him.  But he didn’t.  Something about John Kerry had really stuck with Adam.  He’d hear Bush on the radio and say, “John Kerry didn’t get to be president.  John Bush is president,” and we’d say, “Yes, that’s right,” and then sometimes he’d say, “Dick Cheney is a bad man.”  (Which was sort of prescient of him in light of his subsequent equating of God’s goodness with the ability to avoid shooting people.)  

     And then, just when John Kerry had pretty much dropped off of everyone else’s horizon, Adam said to me one day, “Mama, John Kerry is a very good man, and he would never bite anyone or kick anyone or hit anyone or spit on anyone.”  I told him that was true, that John Kerry probably wouldn’t do any of those things, and then, crudely seizing the moment, trying to press Adam’s insight into John Kerry’s character into the service of some of my most desperate parental machinations, asked him if he wanted to be like John Kerry.  He said he did, and that was great news:  Adam got in trouble for, as they called it at his daycare, “biting a friend,” or “hitting a friend” all the time; he always said he couldn’t help it because he was provoked, and it was true that right about that time some of the boys in the three-year-old class, whom Adam referred to as “the big kids,” had taken to taunting Adam and his friends by calling them babies, which was apparently the most crushing insult possible to a two-and-a-half-year-old.  I heard endless lurid tales of heated playground battles, recounted with great relish:  “So the big kids came up to me and Christian and Lee and said, ‘You are babies,’ so Christian and I said, ‘Well, you are diapers,’ and the big kids said, ‘Well, you are babies,’ and we said, ‘Dipes, dipes, dipes!’  And they got really mad!”  Not surprisingly, these exchanges of words sometimes escalated into exchanges of blows (or of spit), and then Adam would end up in time-out.  He knew he wasn’t supposed to hit or kick or spit on people.  But he always had a reason for having done so:  But Mama, I had to hit that big kid, because he called Christian a baby!  Now I could say, well, would John Kerry have hit the big kid?  No.  Okay, then.  The hitting didn’t stop, but it seemed like Adam was trying harder to stop it, or at least that except for on his really bad-tempered days, it took more provocation than it used to before he would hit someone.

      Over the next few months, John Kerry’s goodness grew and grew.  As we were waiting at a stoplight one afternoon, just a few blocks from home where snacks and videos awaited him, Adam said, “Mama, if John Kerry was here, he’d turn your car into a fire truck so we could run this red light.”  Another time, when we got parked in at a grocery store parking lot, Adam noted that if only John Kerry were there, he’d have the offending car pushed out of our way in no time.

     This was all good stuff for a parent of a preschooler.  Sometimes Adam and his friends seemed to me like naked, pulsing ids, radiating raw, unfettered desire for constant self-gratification.  Put twelve little ids in one room at daycare for nine hours at a stretch, and you can see that there are going to be some rough patches.  But here was Adam, actually taking an active interest in what it meant to be good, because he’d discovered what goodness looked like:  it looked like John Kerry.  And obviously it was a great thing to be John Kerry, because John Kerry was obviously a great man.  So it was probably a great thing to be like John Kerry too, and to be like John Kerry, what you had to do was to be good.

     Naturally Neville and I were very supportive of the John Kerry-worship and did our best to milk it along.  But by the summer Angus died, John Kerry’s influence over Adam’s psyche was clearly on the wane.  Adam still called flags John Kerrys but he no longer mentioned John Kerry’s name when he heard “John Bush” on the radio.  And when one of his classmates made him mad, he didn’t pause to think what John Kerry would do, he just did what Adam wanted to do.  He got in time-out a lot.

     That was why it was so great that Adam discovered God when he did, or rather that he discovered just how similar God and John Kerry were in terms of what they had to offer him on the way of moral guidance.  John Kerry did a really good job of helping us help Adam to be good, but, let’s face it, 10 or 20 years from now, it’s pretty unlikely that in tough situations Adam will still be asking himself, hmmm, what would John Kerry do?  As a moral exemplar, John Kerry just doesn’t have the kind of staying power that you need when you’re the parents of a really headstrong redheaded boy. 

     God, on the other hand, isn’t going anywhere, at least not anytime soon, and especially not here in South Carolina.  And once you know that God wouldn’t shoot anybody, you can’t really get away from the fact that you shouldn’t either.

But there can be problems with God too.  Here’s a conversation Adam and I had about six months after Angus died:

     “Mama, I want Dad to share his candy with me.  God likes it when you share.”

     “That’s right, he does.”

     “And when you don’t share, he doesn’t like you.”

     “That’s not true, Adam.  God always likes us, even when he doesn’t like the things we do.”

     “No he doesn’t.”

     “Yes, he does.  Who told you he didn’t?”

     “Ummm, I don’t know.  Um, Batman.”

     The biggest problem with God, especially for the parents of a small boy, is that there are so many versions of God, and when, in pursuit of my own agenda of trying to help Adam be good, I encourage Adam’s interest in God, I’m opening him up to soak in pretty much anything anyone has to say about God.  What Adam knows is that God is good, and Adam understands that being good means not shooting people, but he also knows that he doesn’t yet know all there is to know about being good.  And so whatever he hears about God, he’s likely to associate those qualities with goodness.  And after a while, that’s going to get confusing.  I don’t want Adam to fear God.  I don’t want him to lie awake at night worrying that God doesn’t like him anymore because he didn’t share his Hot Wheels cars with his brother Owen when Owen asked him to. 

     So in some respects it’s a relief that Adam is by now startling to lose interest in God too.  God means going to Sunday school, and going to Sunday school means putting on the kind of clothes Adam, who favors what he calls “sporty suits,” doesn’t much like to wear.  Also, in Sunday school they make you sit still, and then they serve you apple juice, which is one of Adam’s least favorite beverages.  In all of these respects, confronting God just makes Adam’s life kind of a drag, which in turn takes a lot of the luster off of God the moral exemplar as far as Adam’s concerned. 

     I kind of miss God—or at least the hold God once had over Adam—insofar as God was pretty handy for a while there as an enabler of my goal of trying to help Adam turn out right.  But compared to John Kerry, who was pretty much a blank slate onto whom Adam could project his own evolving understanding of goodness, God was also already pretty fraught and contested territory, a slippery signifier onto which millions of other people have already scripted their own ideas about what it means to be good.

     And as much as I want Adam to share my values, to strive to be good in exactly the ways I want him to be good, I know that in the end he’s just as entitled as any of the rest of us are to work all these things out for himself.  What was so great about John Kerry was that he came along at that perfect moment when Adam was just starting to want to exercise moral self-determination but still had little exposure to anyone’s value system besides mine and Neville’s.  Pretty much all he knew about being good at that point in his life came from us.  But he took it all and poured it into his idea of John Kerry and made a conscious choice to try to live up to John Kerry, and for a while, he could operate under the illusion that he was morally autonomous, and Neville and I could sustain the illusion that what he’d really done was bought into our values hook line and sinker.

     What I see now, though, is that if I don’t want to stifle Adam’s capacity to find his own way toward goodness, I’m going to have to give him room to try out a lot of different versions of goodness, and trust him to find his way through them all to a moral code that makes sense to him.  Sometimes that’s very hard.  Earlier this year, he was entranced by the Power Rangers, which was horrifying.  But now, just like God’s and John Kerry’s, their influence is starting to wane.  A couple weeks ago, though, Neville took the boys to the Monster Jam and they wound up sitting on the front row and got to shake hands with the driver of the legendary Grave Digger monster truck, whose name, if I remember right, is Dennis Anderson.  He might work out okay as our next John Kerry surrogate.  Based on how vigorously he drives, he seems to have a pretty strong work ethic.  And I’m sure that when he smashes up someone else’s monster truck, he usually remembers to say he’s sorry.