Babbling Botkin: "What If My Husband Dies?" - Part Three

I'm enjoying the last week or so of summer vacation with my son.   He's grown so much over the last year that I honestly can't believe it.   

For one small example, our house and land is carved off of a larger dairy farm operated by my in-laws.  Because of the location of our well, the fuel depots for the farm are all located on the farm behind us rather than the main well.  We live on a clay hill with a 'deep' well which means a fuel spill would take much longer to contaminate groundwater than it would on the main farm which is sandy and has a shallow well.  What this means for my small son is that we have an ever-changing and fairly random assortment of farm vehicles that drive by our house and park at the fuel cell.   

Spawn LOVES looking at vehicles up close - but the distance is around 1.5 city blocks from our house.  When we got home from PT, his legs were exhausted; his legs would shake when he walked.  He really, really, really wanted to see the small combine that was gassing up - so I put him on my shoulders and walked with him hanging onto my head.  

That's a small thing - but it's huge.  When he started PT 2 years ago at 18 months, his muscle tone was floppy enough that I couldn't carry him on my hip easily because he couldn't keep his head and chest up without my arm locked across the middle of his back.  I essentially carried him like a sack of potatoes or a paper bag of groceries with his legs dangling free.  This bothered Spawn none at all - but it was rough on my back.    Last year, I could carry him on my hip with my arm slung across his hips - which was so much easier - but to have him on my shoulders, I had to give him support by locking my hands behind this back to form a seat back for him to lean on which was rough on my shoulders.   Now, he can essentially ride piggyback  with me occasionally steading him by having him grip my hands as I held them up above my temples when we were moving over unsteady ground. 

And - because good things happen to little boys and their mamas sometimes - we also saw the gasoline truck come to refill the diesel AND a small haybine working in a nearby field!   

Now, I'm taking a few minutes while someone eats lunch to punch out another set of awesome Botkin quotes from "What If My Husband Dies" on Geoffrey Botkin's YouTube Channel titled "Stand Up And Lead":

[00:02:17] So.  Alright.  Let's talk about three practical things to be thinking about and talking about with your husband and even with your boys together.  I mean, this is, you know, COPD is a very serious thing.  I mean, you know, any chronic illness that could lead to death is something that should be talked about in the family.  It shouldn't be just brushed under the rug.  It should be brought out into the open and talked about in the future. 

We're a few minutes out from when Geoffrey Botkin brings up the three practical things and I feel like this section was a poorly thought-out ad-lib.     He has far more filler phrases than he's had in a few minutes - and I don't know if that's because he's uncertain of the value of his advice or he's flying by the seat of his pants.

Either way, I'm struck by the complete and total lack of practical advice for introducing the concept of death to four boys whose ages we do not know.   Botkin, after all, is the father of seven adult children so he must have done this at some point with his kids.  Right?  His adult kids know death exists.....right?  Presumably so.

Introducing death to little kids is....fraught.  My son got a crash course in death this summer.  My husband's grandfather died a few days before my parents' dog died.  Spawn didn't know Opa at all - but he saw a lot of adults in his life were sad.   Spawn was very aware of Maggie Dog - and hated her and her barking ways.   I quickly read some best-practices for introducing little kids to death and came up with a standard spiel that Maggie died.  When someone dies, their body stops working and we put their body in a cemetery.  We won't see Maggie anymore.   

That was the easy part.  Now, we are figuring out what that means.  It doesn't mean she's on a long car ride.   Or at work.  So far, no games that Spawn has started have involved dead animals - but that may come next.   

I think there could be some use of discussing Dad's COPD if it makes him visibly sick in some ways - but jumping to "Dad's COPD is gonna kill him!  Death is real and coming for Dad!" is too much unless his COPD is very advanced.  If the family is entirely of preschool kids, maybe wait until they are old enough to understand time because none of this will make sense to them.   

On the flip side, a preteen or teen can probably understand COPD when it is explained to them.  If the COPD is limiting his activities, it is past time to discuss what is going on.    In terms of death, I'd be honest about what the doctors know - and don't know - about the husband's life expectancy.

Notice how much Botkin's fluency improves in the next section where he spins his version of history:

[00:02:44]  I mean, families you know so used were so used to doing this because life used to be really short and you could be cut down by almost anything any given week or month.   You you go to church and a typical church was surrounded by a church yard that had gravestones in it and the family is going to church passing through these gravestones. Seeing the dates on them seeing the many different little children would die at age 1, age 2, age 3, age 5 age 10. And young mothers would die in childbirth.  Fathers would die young.  You know, chopping an axe if you if it slipped and you cut your cut yourself on the shin and you got an infection.  And there were no antibiotics in those days.  Yeah, you could be gone in three or four days.  And so, you know people understood that life was short back then.

Botkin is really into harkening back to the historical glory days of the past when the Puritans ran everything the right way.   

When he brings those days up, remember that those days also came with heartbreaking death rates.

Those good old days when a man who was 80 might be married to the wife of his youth - or he might be married to his third wife after his first two wives died.   My maternal great-great-grandmother married in her late 20's to a much older man whose first two wives had died.   He died while she was still raising their children (with the help of her step-daughters who were the same age as she was) - and then she raised five grandchildren after one of her daughters died during the Great Depression on a failing farm.   Thank God for those step-daughters; they worked in Chicago and brought home produce, meat and clothing for their step-nieces and nephews.   

The fact that women died in such high numbers because of the dangers of pregnancy, childbirth, epidemic diseases, and accidents is part of why relatively few daughters were lifelong stay-at-home daughters.   The deaths of married women caused a much larger pool of widowers to be available to single women who were past ideal first marriage age than exists now.   

The ironic bit is that Botkin ignores how amazingly oblivious humans can be to obvious things.  I've met plenty of people who grew up on farms and saw animals mating - but were absolutely horrified when they learned that humans have sex too.   The dangers of drinking and driving or texting and driving are not a secret - but every year people choose to drink or text and drive and die - or kill an innocent victim.   Riding a motorcycle without a helmet is a great way to get a fatal head injury - but various groups worked to overturn a law that required everyone riding a motorcycle to wear a helmet.

The reason is simple: humans compartmentalize.  Bad things happen - but not to me.   This is not a new trend - there are plenty of sermons reaching back to Puritan times of pastors telling their congregation to go look at the graves in the churchyard because any congregant could be next.   That sermon only makes sense if the pastor thinks that many - or most - of the congregation is ignoring the specter of imminent death.  

Fortunately, far fewer people die in midlife.  Ironically, this makes the letter-writer's life a lot harder.  In the good old days, she would look around at the older bachelors* or widowed men and take note at who was looking back at her.   Because of the impossibility of doing domestic chores while earning wages, a healthy widow with a solid track record of pregnancy would be remarried within a year.   With luck, she'd be married to a good man who would raise his stepsons well.  If not, hopefully there is some extended family that could raise the boys to keep them out of harm's way.

None of this helps the letter writer, though.   Too bad Botkin doesn't seem to notice.

*I first read Hurston's "Their Eyes Were Watching God" when I was in college and was twenty-something.  Last year, I watched the movie version with a high school class as a sub.  When I was a youngster, I was disgusted that Janie's grandmother arranged a marriage between teenage Janie and an elderly church member who owned 40 acres of land.   As an adult woman, I watched the teenagers express the same disgust - and told them that I'd arrange the same marriage because I'd be leaving my granddaughter with a roof over her head, food in the pantry, a good-enough position in society, and financial freedom once her husband died.  I left out the fact that I'd also be hoping that the husband's age would keep Janie from an endless cycle of pregnancies and births in her late teens and twenties - but still leave her a young enough widow to have a few kids with a husband of her own choosing.   I'm not much of a romantic, I guess.....