Preschool Confidential 1: A Child Shall Dream Them

Overcoming Grief Among the Tykes

pic by Ruth Ungar Merenda

On the summer morning I am due to entertain the preschoolers, I awake with the ghosts of dead friends heavy inside me. Another dream reunion – hazy but powerful. One friend took his own life in 2004; the other, my son’s godfather, died in 2006 after a motorcycle accident near my home. They were both 39. These men were family to me. We shared history and hope. They emboldened me. I’ve long since accepted I’ll not recover from their deaths.

In dreams, time doesn’t exist as in waking life. I rise from bed with grief undiminished by the illusion of years. It will take some time to readjust to the version of reality to which I’m accustomed, to settle back into my timeline, such as it is. Although deeply sad, I don’t try to hasten the process. Being unstuck in time sets parts of me alight. Even as I respond with ache and depression, the revivified pain brings my friends closer. I can almost hear them laugh, see them from the corner of my eye, walking into the room.

I drink a big mug of black coffee, weep a little, and express to my wife for at least the hundredth time my despair. She knew and loved these men, too. As ever, she hears me out with glistening eyes, nods, hugs me. I grab my battered guitar case, heavier today. I do not want to go to this once-a-week preschool gig. No one, especially tykes, should be subjected to this distraught version of me. But we need the money, and I’ve cast myself as responsible.

The kids – aged two to four – swarm me as I unpack my battered Martin D-28. They shout my name and jump and paw me. Their racket pulls me into the moment a bit more, but I am dwelling on my dead friends, compulsively conjuring them. The children are clueless.

Except for one child. As I shoulder my instrument, I bend beneath the distinctive heaviness of someone’s undivided attention. Beyond the scrum of children is tiny Cecelia, a new arrival, watching me with big dark eyes. We’ve not yet interacted directly. With her bob haircut, white sandals, old timey name, and vintage-looking sundress, she seems from another era, faerie-like. Except for the florescent band-aids covering the many wounds on her shins, knees, and feet.

At the teacher’s order, the children scatter to a circular rug where we will sit and sing together. Later we’ll have a wild dance party on a playground strewn with fresh wood chips. Cecelia, however, moves against the tide. She approaches me.

“Aren’t we best friends?” she asks, clear as crystal, her voice free of accent. These are her first words to me.

Startled, I fumble to respond. She steps closer. She’s uncommonly still.

“We can be best friends,” Cecelia says, as if I’d asked her with some doubt. She holds out her arms and says, “I will sit with you.”

I lean down and accept her tiny person hug. Tears well within me, but I swallow them in a buzz of astonishment. My mind swirls with images of my departed loved ones as Cecelia takes my hand in her palm and leads me to the circle of children. She sits beside me and pats my knee.

“Cecelia, how old you are you?”

“I’m two. And look at my feet.”

I do.

“They are very small,” she says. “And I have so many boo boos. Look.”

“The skin will be stronger when it heals, you know,” I tell her. I’m always saying this to kids.

“I will wear my shoes on the wood chips. So my feet won’t get hurt.” (She will not do this.)

To one of the teachers I say, “She’s two?”

The teacher smiles. She gets it. “She’s maybe two-and-a-half, I think,” the teacher says. “She’s great, right?”

“I may be two-and-a-half,” Cecelia says.

“You’re very smart, Cecelia.”

She says nothing, just nods. Indeed, smart hardly covers it.

I launch into my usual repertoire, call-and-response songs, rock and roll and folk songs. A song about a bat, a song about a polar bear. Cecelia, my new best friend, remains by my side, singing along and laughing, and kicking her banged up little legs. Her warm, expansive aura encompasses me, brightening the part that does not doubt we are all connected, beyond life and time. Both religion and science long ago asserted this fact, but it’s all too uncommon to feel it. This reprieve from my pain, my longing and lonesomeness, will not last, but while it does, it is noisy, sloppy, and powered by the intense, pure energy of children completely present, engaged as a collective in song.

My encounter with Cecelia the morning after my dream may seem remarkable, but it is not unusual to experience such an exchange in a preschool. I’ve been engaged in music-making – and lots of talking – with preschoolers for eighteen years, and they are often trippy and psychic. I jumped into working with this age group partly because the opportunity arose at exactly the time my friends began departing this plane. Being surrounded by life at the weird and wonderful preschool stage was, and remains, a balm to my soul.

Here’s what I now know: Cecelia is still dreaming, which is not to imply she is “detached from reality.” On the contrary. Like her peers, as in dreams, she does not yet grasp the difference between a week, a year, a millennium, and she confuses yesterday with tomorrow with next month. But then again, a physicist will tell you time does not really exist as we perceive it. So, she’s actually right and we’re wrong. She sees me and maybe, being connected to a deeper stratum of being, beyond “time,” she intuits my loss as illusion. As if guided by unseen hands, she acts, and restores me to a hard-to-grasp truth of being.

She will recall little, if any, of these brief years in the alternate universe of early childhood. Like a dream. Especially when she begins learning the representative symbols of the alphabet, and numbers, the names of things, her mind will calcify a little, and she will awaken to a reality like the one you and I create. That’s OK. That’s how it goes around here, that’s how we get along. But it’s not the end of the story.

I’ve been at this awhile, and I’ll wager Cecelia will never stop dreaming, in sleep and otherwise. She will quicken at a song. Songs and dreams are intimately connected to that deeper aspect of ourselves. Decades from now, may she hear a song I taught her. Although she might not know why, may she reconnect to the freedom and the eternal power of a kind, dreaming two-year-old.