I had a full day of long-procrastinated housework planned for yesterday, so I left my son pretty much to his own entertainment devices for most of the day. At some point, between scrubbing the bathtub, loading the washer and dryer, and vacuuming the carpet, I could hear the faint sounds of the TV wafting upstairs.
He was watching "Lion King," a perennial favorite in our house but one that hasn't seen much airtime of late since a recently dropped prohibition in our house has allowed him to explore the fascinating and far edgier world of "Shrek."
The return of "Lion King," however, prompted a few existential questions that something like "Shrek," as crass and tasteless as I find it to be for a 5 year old, would never incite.
On the way to school this morning, he started asking why Scar was a bad guy even though he was "the little one's" uncle. And how did pushing him off the wall kill the little one's dad? ("Did those animals that were running stab him with their horns?" he asked.)
By the way, did I mention you'll need a working knowledge of this movie to understand this blog? For the uninitiated -- Scar, Simba's uncle, killed Simba's father, Moufassa, by throwing him off a rock wall into a herd of stampeding wildebeest.
Most of his preliminary questions I could answer with either straightforward factual info -- although trying to explain death by trampling to a 5 year old was a fun one -- or a "well, he's just a bad guy" deflection. The next question, though, was not so easy.
"If Simba's dad died, how could he come back and talk to him that time when he said, 'You have forgotten yourself and me'?"
(Again, for the unfamiliar, Moufassa's spirit speaks to Simba years after his death.)
I hadn't really thought about how heady that scene really was until I saw it through the eyes of my son who was really quite perplexed by how a dead person could come back and talk to you. Having seen that movie for the first time as a near-adult, I really hadn't given the scene much thought. Maybe it really was a visit by a spirit. Maybe it was Simba's projecting his own memories of his father at a time of crisis. Maybe it was something else altogether. Suffice it to say, I hadn't exactly parsed it all out and made it jibe with my own personal belief system or anything.
So, here I was, two minutes away from pulling into school, struggling to figure out how to explain the concept of a spirit or soul and how it could "visit" (or even more confusing, psychological trauma and projection -- no, I did not even think about going there). Despite my valiant efforts, I'm pretty sure I screwed up the attempt at explaining anything, and my son now either will be terrorized by nightmares about ghosts or will be sitting around staring at the stars hoping for a message from our late cat.
Maybe "Shrek" isn't such a bad idea after all.
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