“Childhood is the kingdom where nobody dies”
Gathering in the tender hours of a crystalline winter morning in Maine, eleven members of the Deer Isle Writers Group enjoyed the blessed bounty of a Bayley buffet before pausing, after some persistent chatter about Thanksgiving dinners and two-year-old puppies and three-thousand-acre broccoli fields in northern Maine, to listen with careful consideration to a prompt delivered by erudite writer cum gifted artist, Frederica Marshall, the prompt curiously provocative, a line from an Edna St. Vincent Millay poem, “childhood is the kingdom where nobody dies,” prompting, as it were, from some of them immediate protestations to the contrary, those writers maintaining that, of course, goldfish die and pets die and, yes, people die, too, when one is yet a child, except that, if you read Millay’s poem, you realize that is not her point at all, that she readily acknowledges that cats die then to be buried by a weeping child in the backyard in a box bigger than a shoe-box, engendering a grief that, though entirely real, does not burrow deep into one’s soul eliciting an outburst of “Oh, God! Oh, God!” in the middle of the night two years hence, and that distant relatives die that the child hardly knows and, therefore, “cannot really be said to have lived at all,” all of this a prelude to the crux of her poem which is that “childhood is the kingdom where nobody dies that matters,” meaning mothers and fathers, meaning mothers and fathers don’t die, except they do sometimes and do eventually, which is her point, that the death of a mother or a father, of one toward whom all of one’s kingdom is oriented, knowing intimately their routines, their foibles, their quotidian pleasures, their well-earned pride, the death of this mother or this father leaving one standing alone in their house drinking tea now gone cold, is the death of childhood.
