I used to read Caleb Goodnight Moon every night before bed. Every night. For years. It was our ritual, the two of us in his room, this little book with its muted colors and that quiet old lady in her rocking chair. He would mouth the words before I said them. He knew them all. I did too. We both had it memorized, but we still read it, slow and deliberate. That was the point.
I heard someone read it recently on a show, and my chest locked up. I did not expect it. You never expect it. You are sitting there, minding your business, and a children’s book reaches through the screen and rips you open. That’s grief. It does not ask permission.
When I went back and reread the words, something else hit me. This book is not just about bedtime. It never was. It is a book about leaving. It is about saying goodbye to everything in a room you will not return to the same way again. Every page, the room gets a little darker. Every page, the world gets a little quieter. And by the end, there is nothing left but stars and air and silence.
The book opens in a great green room. There is a telephone and a red balloon. Bears sitting in chairs. A toyhouse. A little mouse. A comb and a brush and a bowl full of mush. Everything a child’s world contains, laid out carefully, specifically, as if someone needed to name each one before they could let go.
I did not notice this when Caleb was small. I thought it was just a list of things in a room with a nighttime ritual to induce sleep. Now I know what it is. It is an inventory of what you are about to lose.
That is what grief does. It makes you catalog. It makes you take stock of every single thing your child touched, sat in, played with, walked past. You did not know you were memorizing all of it, but you were. The comb he used. The chair he sat in. The sounds of him moving through the house. You try to hold each one as the room gets darker.
Then the goodnight begins.
Goodnight room. Goodnight moon. One by one, the child says goodbye to everything. The light. The red balloon. The bears and the chairs. The kittens and the mittens. Each farewell is small and specific and devastating if you have ever had to do it for real.
I said goodnight to Caleb‘s things. Not the night he died, but over time, one by one. His books, his music, games, stuff that was on his desk, things still on display. I wanted to name each one the way the book does. I wanted to say goodnight to all of it as if the ritual might do what rituals are supposed to do, make sense out of the senseless.
It does not work that way.
The part which wrecks me now is the middle. Goodnight clocks and goodnight socks. These mundane, ordinary things. Death does not just take the big moments. It takes the ordinary ones. It takes the socks on the floor and the clock on the wall and the background noise of someone else living in your house. In the blog post “Haunted,” I wrote about how Caleb is everywhere. The eye doctor, the store, a lake we visited, a trail we hiked. He haunts every mundane errand because he was a part of all of them. Goodnight to his being in the production booth where I can almost hear him telling me what he would do differently with the mix. Goodnight to the lake where speed boats would make him look up from his book. Goodnight to all the ordinary days I did not know were extraordinary.
Then comes the line which guts me.
Goodnight nobody.
Two words. The author, Margaret Wise Brown, slipped this into a children’s book and no one blinks when they are reading it to a toddler. I always thought it was odd and assumed it was a silly way to fit the cadence of the story. But read it after your child is dead. Read it when the room is empty and the chair is empty and the silence is so loud it has a sound. Goodnight nobody. That is the empty chair at the holidays I wrote about. That is the absence which English does not have a word for, which I described the day those cops walked up my sidewalk. Goodnight to the one who should be here and is not. Goodnight to the void.
I think about the quiet old lady whispering “hush.” When Caleb was alive, she was a comforting figure. A grandmother soothing the room. Now she sounds like the world telling me to be quiet. Hush. Stop grieving. Stop talking about your dead son. Stop making people uncomfortable. People avoid the conversation, avoid us, avoid saying his name, and the silence they leave behind sounds exactly like that whisper.
In “My Not Strong, Unbrave New World,” I wrote about how talking about Caleb is one of the few pleasures I have. Do not hush me. Do not avoid his name. You are not protecting me from a reminder. He is in my head a hundred times a day. You cannot add to the pain, except when you avoid him. Tell me your stories with him, or at least, say his name.
The book ends with three lines: Goodnight stars. Goodnight air. Goodnight noises everywhere.
It moves from the specific to the infinite. From the objects in the room to the entire world outside of it. The child has said goodbye to everything they can name and then to everything they cannot. The stars. The air. All the noises everywhere.
This is what losing a child does to you. First you grieve the specific things. His laugh. The way he ran sound. The last time we saw Avengers together in May 2018, and I have no picture from that day. Then the grief expands past what you can name. It becomes the air you breathe. It becomes every noise. It is not a room anymore. It is everywhere, and you cannot say goodnight to it because it never ends.
I read this book to my son hundreds of times. Probably a thousand times. I held him while his eyes got heavy and his breathing slowed and the room got dark and quiet. When I was putting him to sleep, I did not know I was rehearsing.
Goodnight, Caleb.
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