Gone Home

Last night as I was tucking Ben in, we talked about Grant's Farm. "Maybe next time I'll see a pig," he said, and I agreed. Then he said, "Maybe I'll see a dinosaur too."

I paused. How do you explain extinction to an almost-three-year-old? "Sweetie, there aren't dinosaurs any more," I said. "They lived a long long time ago."

Ben pondered this information and then said, "There used to be dinosaurs, but there aren't anymore. They went home."

I find it strange and comforting that that "going home" is his euphemism for dying. I explained about how archeologists dig up dinosaur bones and try to guess what dinosaurs were really like. I told him there were no people during the time of the dinosaurs, but now people exist and dinosaurs don't. I told him we could still talk about dinosaurs and play with dinosaur toys and read books about dinosaurs.

Underneath my stream of words, though, I felt a great sadness of the futility of it all--the enterprise of being alive, raising young, sharing words that make hardly a difference in the vast universe. What a mysterious world, where giant creatures can vanish, where people can exist and walk the surface of a planet for a handful of human years.

I gave Ben a hug and tried not to let him see the tears in my eyes. When I tucked him in, he kept his plastic dinosaur by his side. As I walked out of his room, I thought, Someday, we will be gone. Our species will be gone. Our planet will be gone. What does it mean to go home?