The Corner In The Middle

My family and I are dealing with some terrible news, and I’m going to write it here because I don’t have anyone close to talk to, so dear invisible friend:

Let me preface this by saying my four year old daughter loves her grandma, like no other person except for her brother on the planet.  She talks to her all the time, she loves talking about her, she loves to pretend phone her, and she loves nothing more than the constant influx of packages and letters she gets from her in the mail (the only thing she loves more than beautiful dresses are Disney princesses).  Three days ago we found out that her grandma has terminal cancer and has about three months to live.  Dear god:  how am I supposed to tell my four year old daughter, the girl who has one heaven sent fan, that her grandma isn’t going to be here anymore?

The only person who constantly loves and sends gifts to our baby girl besides my wife’s awesome sister, is her grandmother.  My closest family (parents, brother, ect…) doesn’t even send her birthday or christmas cards for christ’s sake.  So, how do I know that she will ask what happened to nanny, well, because whenever a box or the mail comes, she asks if it’s from nanny, and often it is.  So how long can can she not get dresses before she realizes she needs to call nanny and ask why she didn’t send a new dress this month?  How the fuck am I supposed to fix this?  I feel horrible for my wife, she is very, very close to her nanny too, but she’s an adult and can grieve and I can hold her and do my best, but what the fuck am I supposed to do for my daughter?

My daughter thinks dying consists of sleeping and getting magic tears and fairy dust and everything is ok again, how do I ruin her of her lack of knowledge of this?  I don’t really expect any comments because A) I am probably not going to tell her even if there is a good way and B)most of you don’t have kids so I don’t expect you can have any idea how goddamn horrible and wrenching and twisting my heart is inside, much less any valuable guidance to help me.  I’m sorry to burden the net with my grief, but I don’t have any close family to rest on, so my apologies.  I don’t know when I’m going to write again, I feel sick and I wish the worst thing in my life was law school, and I sincerely pray that none of you have to deal with this anytime soon.

This entry was posted on Sunday, January 31st, 2010 at 3:57 pm and is filed under Uncategorized. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.