Lazy Self-Indulgent Book Reviews

…about explaining Troy Davis’ impending death to her children is truly excellent. And her instincts on when to lie, and when to soften, seem to be consistent with the best we can hope for in people raising the next generation of kidlets.

Like Emily, my parents very rarely tried to make the world seem like a better place than it was, for my brother and I. Which is not to say that we walked around all day in tremendous amounts of trauma about the basic nihilistic unfairness of human existence, or anything, but that we trusted them to tell us how things actually are.

My best friend died during heart surgery when we were in eighth grade together, and when I got home from school that day, my father said, essentially “this is the most bullshit thing I’ve ever heard, I’m so sorry.” And that was really what I needed and wanted to hear, honestly.

Sometimes things are bullshit.

But, at the same time, this seems very right to me:

“Well, how do they kill him? Will he just stand there and have to — let them kill him?” 

There are moments in parenting when not telling the whole truth is very important. I did not say “They will wheel Troy into a tiled room. They will strap him to a gurney. They will inject him with a series of drugs that will kill him in stages, despite the fact that there is real evidence that these drugs do not always work as smoothly as we are told. Despite the fact that he may suffer as he dies, they will strap him down, and people will watch, and they will inject him, and Troy Davis will die, even though he is almost certainly innocent.” 

Instead, I swallowed hard and thought about our cat, the one we put to sleep a couple years back, the one whose last living memory was of being in my arms. I said “Oh no, honey, they’ll give him drugs like we gave Chauncey. The first one will make him sleep, and the next one will stop his heart. Do you remember how Chauncey died, quietly in my arms?”

Fuck.