Viking

photo by the author

My daughter asks me, “What would we do if Daddy died?” She’s six, and she doesn’t want the platitudes; she wants a plan. She would like to see the life insurance policy and a budget or two. Emotions are easier to handle if you’re well fed and well rested. I know she’s right, but my hands shake on the steering wheel, and I keep my focus straight ahead. If I divvy up her personality like our relatives do her features, she inherits her dark introspection from me—like her hair and the shape of her eyes.

Every morning, she recounts her dreams. In one, she dreams her father died. She’s in the ocean, alone with him and his best friends, and when he dies, they panic. She plans and executes his funeral before comforting the grown men. She furrows her brow as she tells me this. “I put his ashes in the round diver’s helmet and threw it back to the ocean. It had chosen him. It only seemed fair.” Her death dreams are less nightmare and more exploratory—scenarios with solutions and a clear way forward. People think she gets the practicality from her father.

I don’t tell her the worst-case scenarios my brain plays. The lists of things I would need to take care of her, without him. The way I know wishing him a safe trip doesn’t keep him safe, but I say the words anyway. I don’t tell her how often I tiptoe into her room and lift her small body more squarely on the bed—in sleep, she twists and turns, her arms and legs flung wide, while I sleep on my side, bent tightly around myself. I don’t tell her how it’s all a ruse to check the rise and fall of her chest. The way I used to stand over her crib, the back of my hand nearly touching her soft, perfect lips, feeling the slow, steady warmth of her breath. I have tried my best to protect her. She’s not sheltered, but cherished. She plays with an abandon that chokes me with jealousy and pride.

*

She touches the tears on my face as I wake from a dream. My mouth is full of the coppery tang of blood. “Did you dream you died?” she asks. “Are you afraid of dying?”

I hug her close and kiss the tousled curls at her temple—curly like my hair but finer and with less frizz. I know when I brush them later, she will bite her lip and try not to cry. I will spray detangler that smells like strawberries into her hair and work my way from the bottom of her ringlets to the top of her scalp.

“No,” I say. “I’m not afraid of dying.” And it’s not a lie. It’s just an incomplete thought. I dream of death almost nightly: hers, her father’s, my father’s, my siblings’, my mother’s, the dog’s, the African violet’s—it’s just starting to bloom. I dream a parade of death, but never my own. Dying is easy, I think, but I don’t say this.

*

When she’s eight, she tells me she wants a Viking’s funeral. I gaze into her eyes, and they are steady. They are darker than my own, clearer and brighter and lit from within like honey made from palmetto or mangrove. “You could burn me with my possessions,” she says. “Send me out to sea. I’d float into the sky.”

I wonder if she would miss the land as much as I would. I tell her, “If everything works out well for us, I won’t bury you. You will bury me.”

She pauses for just a moment, my girl, and says, “But if something bad happens, something unexpected, burn me like I’m a Viking. Like I’m a warrior.”