My cousin's husband died on Friday after a long and courageous battle with a brain tumor. My cousin, a model of strength, explained to their 4 and 2 year-old daughters in the last week that their father was in the process of dying. She explained that his brain would become less active, and then his body would become less capable, and then finally, it would become lifeless, or "dead".

With the body laid out for the wake, their 4 year old, Saar, greeted visitors at the door and told them, "My father has become dead."

Children, unbound by rules of grammar and a manicured vocabulary, have an enviable ability to find the truest use of language. I prefer the four-year-old's terminology. It expresses life in death, an active process, the act of becoming dead. It reveals death as integrated with life, life moved on to another stage, become something else. Graceful, like a chrysalis, transformed.

When it's my time, I too, am going to "become dead".

 

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