Yesterday, two tragedies--one fictional and one very real, one small and one devastatingly huge--aligned in a jarring way.
For the past few months, my wife and I have been reading the Harry Potter books aloud to our five-year-old daughter. We read a chapter a night, and it is a part of the day that all of us look forward to. Or at least, we all looked forward to it until last night. Last night, both my wife and I dreaded it.
We dreaded it because we've read the series before, and we knew what happens in that chapter. We read "Flesh, Blood, and Bone," one of the last chapters of Harry Potter and the Goblet of Fire. While earlier parts of the books have introduced death, brutality, and violence, this is arguably the first time in the series death comes for a character that readers have had the chance to get to know.
It was my turn to read, and as my daughter sat there, excited to re-enter a magical world that she has come to know very well, I tried to prepare her for what was going to happen. I told her that it was a scary chapter and that it would be okay if she asked me to stop reading if she needed a break. She nodded, confident that she was fully prepared for what would happen.
So I read. And soon, when the character died, she crawled into my wife's lab and began to sob. Which made my wife sob. I stopped reading to give my daughter a little while to absorb what we had just read. When I asked if she was ready for me to keep reading, she said she was, because she wanted to find out how the character would come back to life. But as Albus Dumbledore notes in the very first novel, not even magic can bring people back to life--an important moment of world building to prepare readers for chapters just like this one.
In November 2015, as news of shootings in Paris began popping up in our social media newsfeeds, my wife and I turned on the television to get more information about what was happening. It was mid- to late-afternoon, so our children were still up. We could only watch a few minutes before our daughter started asking us to explain what the reporters were talking about. We did our best, but words rarely capture the pain and the sense of powerlessness most of us feel when terrible things like this happen.
And then yesterday, as reports of the mass shooting in a gay club in Orlando once more revived that pain and that powerlessness, we shared a little--just a very little--of what was going on in the world with our daughter. We truncated it to the extent that she didn't really understand why her parents were so devastated by the news.
Just a few hours later, we read that chapter in Goblet of Fire, and our daughter felt very keenly the pain of sudden loss and the agony of being able to do absolutely nothing to stop it from happening. She tried to come up with ways to explain that maybe the character hadn't died, or maybe somebody would be able to bring him back to life. She resisted the reality that the character was in fact dead. I understand. We all want to resist reality at moments like this.
If we exposed our daughter to just a little more information about the shooting in Orlando, or earlier massacres in other nations, or the death tolls associated with horrific natural disasters, I have no doubt that my sensitive little girl would mourn for those people. She knows what death is, and she very naturally feels for others. But we try to find the nearly imperceptible line--so imperceptible that it is probably not actually possible--between protecting our very young child from the sheer brutality of the world and exposing her to enough that, as she grows older, she will be as prepared as any of us can be for the astonishing inhumanity exercised by so many people in this world.
In many ways, fiction offers a way to expose children to the terrible things people can do to one another. As soon as I finished reading the chapter, as my daughter sat in shock at what had just happened to a character that she had grown to like and to feel like she knew to some extent, my wife and I were quick to remind her that this was just a story--that none of these characters were real, that none of these things had ever happened.
That reminder seemed to make an important difference. In the past, my daughter has bemoaned the fact that the characters and world she has come to love are not real. But now, she visibly took solace in that same fact. Fiction became a shield against the horror of what she had just heard.
The night before we read the chapter, before we woke up to horrifying stories of 50 people dying in a senseless massacre because one guy didn't like seeing a same-sex couple kiss, I told my wife that I didn't look forward to reading that chapter with our daughter. There was no turning back afterward. The world that she had come to know and love would forever be changed by those very few pages. It was one loss of innocence that foreshadowed many more, moving inevitably nearer.
As painful as it is for me as a father to see my daughter devastated by a story, it's vital for her to learn how to deal with the kind of crushing pain that so many of us felt yesterday in the aftermath of yet one more mass slaughter. She will experience pain associated with the deaths of many people as she grows older, as will my son, who is too young to understand any of this yet. And they will need to learn to wrestle and live with that pain--pain that feels insurmountable when we first encounter it.
I don't know if there is anything new or profound to be discovered in this micro/macro juxtaposition. I have written elsewhere that we need to work harder to act with empathy toward others, but that's hardly original. And certainly there's nothing new to the idea that literature can inspire sublime feeling in us. Sadly, I've already written about the pain, anger, and helplessness parents can feel in light of senseless murder.
This is an incomplete thought. Because honestly, I don't know how to complete thoughts at moments like this. There is something to be learned here about teaching responsible citizens, but I am not ready to articulate that just yet.
