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Mr. Rogers Taught Me About Death



This morning I was hanging out with my little girl. She usually watches an episode of Sesame Street while we get her ready. It's entertaining enough to keep her focus, and distracting enough for us to get her dressed without a struggle.

Today though we actually had some leisure time as she wasn't going to day care and mommy was feeling lazy AF. I decided that maybe we could try something else, as it's gotten painful to re-watch Sesame Street over and over. I'm starting to become like one of those weirdo cinephile folks who can mouth word for word every line in some jaunty art film they worship. Except in my case it's not exactly high art but rather the episode where Elmo is learning how to ride his tricycle.

I flipped through Amazon Prime to see if I could find anything interesting in the kids section. And interesting is exactly what I found. I stumbled across some old episodes of Mr. Rogers Neighborhood and immediately put it on. I hoped my kid would be into it, and thankfully she was. She and I sat on the floor wide eyed watching this slow paced, mellow kids show. It was mind blowing.

Because the very first episode in the queue was all about death. I'm not kidding.

This episode of Mr. Rogers was titled Death of a Goldfish. It began by showing his dead goldfish floating upside down in the tank. He tries to revive it with salt (which is ill advised in most circumstances, right?) and reiterated how dead the fish actually was. Then he talked about his childhood dog who died and how sad he was because of what his dog, Mitzi, meant to him. Then he buried the fish. Then we watched puppets.

Wait, pause. Is this the same Mr. Rogers Neighborhood I used to watch when I was little? This isn't at all what I recall about this show. I don't remember there ever being anything heavy like that. I remembered the puppets, the neighbor song, how he changed his shoes and jacket at the top of the show. But talking about death? No, that doesn't ring a bell. But as I started looking into some of his past episodes, he talked about this kind of stuff all the time!

The thing is, the way he broached the topic of death and how to handle it was absolutely beautiful. It was elegant, kind, honest and straightforward all at once. Things die. That's life, neighbor. It was heartfelt. without being overwhelmingly emotional or dramatic. It is exactly the way I want my daughter to learn about death. A way that I don't think I would be able to successfully communicate.

Now I don't think my kid got what the whole thing was about, she was more interested in the music and train and stuff. But it got me thinking about how we as a society now address these kinds of issues, and how our kids are going to learn about these things differently than we did.

When we were kids there weren't mass shootings every single day. We didn't have to have lock down drills just in case there is an active shooter in our school. We didn't have a fucking president who sincerely proposes that school teachers have concealed weapons on them at all time because of the likelihood of there being an actual active shooter situation. We didn't live in an endless cloud of fear every day of our lives. 

I remember being warned about dudes in vans who'll ask me if I like candy and try to kidnap me. We had earthquake drills where we would duck and cover under our desks. We learned about fire safety and how to call the police in case of an emergency. But never, ever did we hear about the possibility that we could die while sitting in our classrooms because someone was angry and had access to an assault weapon.

Being a parent in America nowadays has become an exercise in terror. There isn't a day that goes by where I am not paralyzed with fear that my baby will get hurt, or worse. Sometimes the scenarios that run through my head are so extreme that it makes my body shake. We are living in terrifying times, and the only thing I need to do is protect my kid both physically and emotionally from this fear. How do I prepare my babies for the worst while instilling the importance of reaching for the best?

I guess what I'm trying to say is that when we were kids our fears were, or at least seemed, manageable. We were taught practical skills that could keep us safe, and it felt like we had some semblance of control over it. Of course we didn't know about all the other scary things that were happening in the world, but what we did know we could handle by learning how to say no to the guy in the van with the candy, and that a doorway or a table would protect us from something falling on our heads as the earth shook, and that if you touch a doorknob and it's hot, to not go into that room because you could get burned.

While technology is amazing it's also debilitating. It's possible that we know too damn much and it's strangling us. I want to go back to a time when I didn't wake up with the first thought being, "Oh God, please don't let there be another mass murder today. Just one day, that's all I ask!" only to go on Facebook and immediately learn that I would have to hope that the next day didn't start with something horrible happening, because today was sadly already a wash.

In my humble opinion we need to go back to a Mr. Rogers time. A time that didn't include 24 hour fear mongering news cycles, and Twitter, and a pathetic sociopath in the highest office in the land who runs the country 280 characters at a time, and it being acceptable to everyone.

Of course bad things happened when we were kids, but we weren't aware of it like we are now. Yes, it's good to be informed and yes, it's good to have a plan of action. But don't you think we as humans would be so much happier if we didn't have this endless stream of shit flowing our way all the damn time? I do. I sincerely do.

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