Page 162 - A Little Life: A Novel

cross the street and would think how absurd it was that my child, that any
child, could expect to survive this life. It seemed as improbable as the
survival of one of those late-spring butterflies—you know, those little white

ones—I sometimes saw wobbling through the air, always just millimeters
away from smacking itself against a windshield.
And let me tell you two other things I learned. The first is that it doesn’t
matter how old that child is, or when or how he became yours. Once you
decide to think of someone as your child, something changes, and
everything you have previously enjoyed about them, everything you have
previously felt for them, is preceded first by that fear. It’s not biological; it’s

something extra-biological, less a determination to ensure the survival of
one’s genetic code, and more a desire to prove oneself inviolable to the
universe’s feints and challenges, to triumph over the things that want to
destroy what’s yours.
The second thing is this: when your child dies, you feel everything you’d
expect to feel, feelings so well-documented by so many others that I won’t

even bother to list them here, except to say that everything that’s written
about mourning is all the same, and it’s all the same for a reason—because
there is no real deviation from the text. Sometimes you feel more of one
thing and less of another, and sometimes you feel them out of order, and
sometimes you feel them for a longer time or a shorter time. But the
sensations are always the same.
But here’s what no one says—when it’s your child, a part of you, a very

tiny but nonetheless unignorable part of you, also feels relief. Because
finally, the moment you have been expecting, been dreading, been
preparing yourself for since the day you became a parent, has come.
Ah, you tell yourself, it’s arrived. Here it is.
And after that, you have nothing to fear again.

Years ago, after the publication of my third book, a journalist once asked
me if you could tell right away whether a student had a mind for law or not,

and the answer is: Sometimes. But often, you’re wrong—the student who
seemed so bright in the first half of the semester becomes steadily less so as
the year goes on, and the student about whom you never thought one thing
or another is the one who emerges as a dazzler, someone you love hearing
think.