Last week at dinner when it was daughter Eva’s turn to share highlights and lowlights of her day, she was nearing the finish line and then suddenly stops and goes, “OH I FORGOT. There’s a really sad story.”
“What is it?” I said, in a wide-eyed over-exaggerated childlike way, to mirror her dramatic setup.
Then she unloaded with this crazy story she learned from her kindergarten teacher at school.
“One day, there was a bad guy. And he took a plane, and he CRASHED it into a building. And it died so many people. And even people on the ground were died too, because of the building crashing. It’s really, really sad.” [Eva makes face pouty here.]
Upon realizing what she was telling us, Matt and I looked at each other and he responded by saying something like, “Yes that was really really sad. And those people shouldn’t have died.” (I’m not sure Eva realized this was an actual event that happened until that point, in which her dad brought his personal memory of 9/11 into the conversation and made that connection for her, whether we should have or not.)
Then I go, “The guy who crashed the plane into the building died, too.”
And immediately Eva comes back with, “But he WANTED to die. He flew that plane knowing he was going to die.”
A week later I am still stunned to hear the 9/11 story recounted to me by my five-year-old as a distant story, and not something real that she experienced in her lifetime. And also stunned that she processed all of this and they talked about it at school but I guess you’re not supposed to shelter small people from news … but still, yikes. I keepl turning over this whole scene in my head, and the adorable way she said, “And it died so many people.” Because I don’t even know if she has ever used the verb “kill” before. Sigh.