Grow with their Flow

This morning, my 5-year-old came out of the bedroom looking sad.

He sat down next to me on the kitchen floor and told me he’d had a nightmare that I was dying. In his dream, we were on our way to a picnic, and my eyes started turning white—that was how he knew I was about to die. He said he cried in the dream, and as he recounted it, a few real tears slipped down his cheeks.

Later, while we were getting ready for school, he said quietly, “If you die, you have to leave something behind for me.” He told me he would miss me very much and would want to have something that belonged to me.

I offered him my rings, my earrings, my clothes. But really, what would make a real difference?

Then he asked, “Where would you go after you die?”
I told him, “Some people believe you go to heaven.”
He paused, then asked, “What do you believe in?”

Good question. What do I believe, my son—and why? How do I explain things like this to a 5-year-old, when I’m still trying to understand them myself?

For a moment, I lost my words. The question arrived before I was ready — the way his questions always do. I wanted to say: We’ll find out when we die. Honest, but not quite right for seven in the morning. What came out instead was something softer. Some things in life don’t have clear answers. But I think we go somewhere like heaven. And I think it’s a good place to be.

He stared at me for a moment. Whether it landed, I don’t know. Then we got on with teeth and shoes and the familiar hum of the day, and the question folded itself back into the ordinary the way children’s questions somehow do — leaving me holding it long after he’d let it go.

I think about it at night, usually, in the quiet after the house goes still. If death is nothingness, then why does meaning feel so urgent? Why does the ache for purpose keep showing up? I notice it in my children too — same parents, same home, and yet they arrived so differently into the world, as though something was already decided before they got here. In my twenties, during a stretch of no-pay leave recovering from a burnout I didn’t yet have a name for, I read everything I could find — religious texts, philosophy, near-death accounts that were harder to dismiss than I expected. My head couldn’t fully get there. My heart kept pulling. I never resolved it. Life got busy and I stopped looking, but I never stopped wondering.

My autistic brain resists what it cannot fully map. But somewhere between what I’ve read, what I’ve witnessed in palliative care, and what I feel in the quiet — a sense has settled in me. That this is not all there is. That we are here to learn something, to do something that matters, and that what comes after will be okay. I cannot prove it. I cannot draw a clean line from premise to conclusion. But I find I cannot dismiss the feeling either, and I’ve stopped trying to. When my son asked me what I believe and why, standing in our kitchen in his school uniform with real tears still drying on his face — I didn’t have the answer ready. Neither of us did.

If this resonated, you might also find comfort in A Legacy Left Unwritten — What a Dying Patient Taught Me About the Time We Have With Our Children, where I write about mortality, parenthood and what really matters.