The Great Unknown

An unlikely friendship helped my son grapple with divorce, death and...

- Jowita Bydlowska

THE APARTMENT MY SON, Hugo, and I moved into after my divorce was nice, but the feeling we had was of holding on to a raft amidst angry waters. We were on the west side of Toronto, about a 30-minute drive from Hugo's dad's new home. During the first week he stayed with me there, my eight-year-old son responded to the change in his life by trashing his room before finally letting tears come and allowing me to hug him.

At that time, he also developed a new fear-the fear of death. "I can't sleep. I am thinking about death," he would say when I would catch him with his eyes wide open, in the darkness of his bedroom, his little body tightly surrounded by a cordon of beady-eyed stuffies.

Hugo had always considered himself an atheist, ever since his dad had told him at age four that God, like Santa, wasn't real-and that when we die, we turn to dust. For Hugo, it had been just something to say to make adults laugh and confuse his innocent buddies in kindergarten. But now that he was growing up, he was finally grasping the concept of time, and that he was slowly but surely moving toward the big unknown. But I think his fear of death also came about because nothing seemed certain anymore: our little family was no longer a unit, and our lives were divided into split-custody homes. When the nights got too hard for Hugo, we'd fall asleep holding on to each other like two monkeys, all the unknowns stayed away for one more night.