Big question

Recently, Mike has started asking me about death. At four, he's old enough to have registered certain facts about nature and to draw inferences. He raised the topic one afternoon while we -- just me and him -- were at the supermarket.

I'd just finished bagging some broccoli. As we moved out of the veggie section and into the kimchi aisle (this was at Lotte), we passed an elderly, decrepit lady. Shortly afterwards, Mike asked me if people could be 200 years old.

"Not really," I told him. "That would pretty old. Some people are 100, though."

He thought about this. "Can people die?" he asked.

"Ah, well, yes," I told him. "People can die."

"How?"

"When people get very old, their bodies are all tired out." Just then I remembered that we could use some bean sprouts, so I pushed the cart back into the veggies section.

"Have you seen anyone die?" he asked, while I struggled with a plastic bag.

I thought about my grandmother, who died last spring, about half a year after being diagnosed with a brain tumor. Although I wasn't there at the moment of her death, I had visited her a few weeks before. I certainly felt I had been witness to her dying.

"No, not really," I told Mike. And then we headed off in search of tomatoes.

***

Sunday, on our way to his Chinese class, he had further questions. "How old do you have to be to die?" he asked from the back seat.

"Well, usually people are very old. A hundred, say."

"You said a hundred, not one hundred. A hundred is bigger than one hundred," he began to reason. "That means it could be one hundred and fifty four million thousand."

"Hmm…"

"How do people die?" he again wanted to know.

"When people are very old, they become worn out. Their bodies are tired and they don't have energy any more." I had to brake abruptly, as a car in front of me stopped to make a turn. "Also, if there's a bad accident..."

"Like if a car drives across you?"

"Right. That's why we have to be careful around cars."

Mike told me a story he heard in school, about some guy who could lift Jeeps. The Jeep, he said, went on top of this person but he didn't even have to go to the hospital. I said he must have been pretty tough and that maybe he exercised a lot.

"Daddy, when are you going to die?"

"Ah. hopefully not for a long time!" I said. We passed a building under construction and some cranes, and went over a speed bump.

"When I am a hundred years old, I am going to have a lot of energy, and I won't be tired," Mike told me.

"Great!" I said. "So you should eat your vegetables!"