Part of the Story

I had both the kids today, A. who’s two, and M. who’s seven, both beautiful, both smart. But entertaining a two-year-old and a seven-year-old simultaneously poses a challenge, and I’d used up all my ideas the day before. I had a flash of what I thought was brilliance this morning as I ran out the door. I had a children’s book about Vincent van Gogh, and I had a big coffee-table book of his paintings and drawings. Ah! Look! A theme! I brought them both and congratulated myself for being clever.

Until I realized, while reading about van Gogh’s life, that I now had the distinct privilege of explaining mental illness and suicide to a seven-year-old. I was kicking myself—how do you forget that van Gogh was probably schizophrenic, cut off his own ear, and later shot himself in a wheat field? I guess I figured the book (with a cartoon Vincent and Theo traipsing around France) would explain it for me or be a little more careful about the more unsavory parts of his life. Well, at least the author had the good sense to leave absinthe out of it (though I noticed a cartoon Gauguin drinking something a telltale shade of green).

I went into damage control mode as well as I could, trying to bring mental illness into the vocabulary of a (rather brilliant) first grader, assuring her that had he lived today doctors would have been able to help van Gogh, trying to use it as a teaching point (what should you do if you know someone who is very sad and never feels happy?). But I thought, and had the good sense not to say out loud, that the world might have missed out on something if he’d been healthy, if he’d been well adjusted, if he’d stayed out of trouble, if he’d had success while he was still alive. Can truly good art come without pain? Can a truly good story be told without darkness?

Needless to say, we never made it to the coffee table book. M. didn’t want to see the paintings and said she’d rather play something happy now. Later, as we were playing outside (having been transported there, by a time machine), M. turned to me and said, “Next time you bring me a story, will you bring me one that’s not so sad?” I smiled apologetically and agreed. And mentally crossed off the artists and the poets and the revolutionaries and the dreamers and the prophets. Because she’s seven, there’s the rest of her life to learn that suffering is just part of the deal, and she needs someone far smarter to explain that to her.