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On Saturday, Rue died.
She also managed to die last week, and I think she passed away as well sometime during vacation in August. She was sweet, and nimble, and moved through the trees like a sprite, like an innocent creature trapped in a savage land. In the end, she took a spear to her belly, and Katniss sang to her as she gasped her final breath.
I would not so glibly describe the death of a child were she in fact "real", and yet, to my 10 year-old daughter, enthralled as she is by all of the characters who people Suzanne Collins' The Hunger Games, losing Rue is something that must be experienced over and over, must be contemplated and wrestled with, must, inevitably, be questioned. "Why does she have to die, Dad?" That's the question my child asks me, and it does no good to remind her that Rue is a character in a novel, because to my daughter, at the moment of Rue's death, Rue is a real as our front door, and our front door, she knows, opens to a world full of some not-so-nice stuff.
My kid reads the The Hunger Games over and over. She adds this to her blossoming roster of a zillion other dystopian novels. There's even a special section in the bookstore for "young readers" who can't seem to get enough of this stuff. This year's holiday reading list for kids has got to be among the most fascinating (and unsettling) to emerge in years.
What in the world is going on? What does my kid find so compelling? She read I think all of Margaret Haddix's books (children hiding from government authorities less they should be discovered to be the illegal extra child that the State has expressly forbidden). She read an eerie and beautiful fictional memoir called The Adoration of Jenna Fox. Here a girl is illegally saved from death by her father's miscreant use of tissue engineering. Is Jenna the same girl now as before the accident that tried to claim her life? Was her father's sacrifice worth the risk, worth the fact that the whole family is now endangered?
She even dove into what could have been an almost tawdry novel called Girl in the Arena. Here, the girl's father fights to the death as a professional gladiator in a soon-to-be and uncomfortably recognizable Cambridge, Massachusetts. The girl soon finds herself drawn to similar life threatening battles.
In all of the stories, those who lead us are pretty awful. They are brutal, totalitarian, lying, and violent. Protagonists must make grave concessions, often sacrificing their very lives, or else face the prospect that the dystopian drudgery of existence will remain stubbornly fixed and unaltered. In other words, in all these stories the world seems pretty damn dismal. And yet, the books that tell of these worlds are being gobbled up in record numbers in the Young Adult section of your local library or bookstore.
(This is not, by the way, necessarily how I feel about our leaders. I am trying to see all this through the eyes of my daughter.)
As a child psychiatrist and as a parent, I have been asked by not a few worried adults about the appropriateness of this material for kids. One of my buddies summed it up pretty succinctly:
"Do they really think that the world sucks this much?" He paused. "Do we?"
Well, no, I guess, is my answer. The world is still pretty cool, and we owe it to our kids to remind them of that. Still, stories are powerful means by which difficult topics can be safely addressed, and certainly our world, while pretty cool, is also full of difficult topics. Kids have really big radars, and we can't expect them NOT to pick up on the unpleasant nuances of our planet.
I was quite taken by The Hunger Games, and while I know that it is not everyone's cup of tea, it felt real to me. It felt like it asked the right questions. What would YOU sacrifice to make the world better?
So, driving to buy high chocolate at the local Starbucks near my house, my daughter and I pass under a bridge that supports the commuter rail. The bridge rattles like a tired old man, helping the train to drag folks home or off to work, and people dismount at the station and pull their collars tight against the winter breeze.
As there have been for the past 10 or so years, there were banners again this holiday season hanging from the bridge, welcoming soldiers home for the holidays. And, as happens thankfully more rarely, there was a different looking banner this time as well, more solemn, not colorful, full of palpable sadness and pride. It thanked a brave man from my town for his sacrifice in the efforts over seas.
I asked my daughter what she thought of all this, all these banners and signs that mix with the lit up trees and the festive quest for Hot Cocoa.
"What do you mean?" she responds.
"The signs," I say. "What are your thoughts? Did you notice them?"
"Dad," she says calmly, too calmly I worry for her tender and innocent years. "We've been at war since I was born. There are always signs."
Wow, I think, though I suppose I knew this. It just sounds weird coming from her mouth.
Neither of my children has ever known a world when we are not at war.
And I have never fought in these wars, but my daughter wonders, every now and then, when we see a soldier in an airport or when she catches me reading the paper, if I ever will.
"Will they call you to fight like they do in The Hunger Games?" She knows the answer for now, but still she finds the question necessary and a little worrisome.
After staring more at the banners, she begins again to tell me about Rue. "I'm just not sure she had to die," she continues, perseverative in her contemplation of this fictional character's short but noble life.
We sit in silence as I wait for a car to vacate a spot that I plan to take.
"But I guess sometimes things have to happen a certain way....."
A version of this essay appeared in the Community Blogs for the Boston Globe
