He has a plan though; he knows how he’ll differ to everyone else. He knows how he will become the first person ever to always wake up. He simply won’t let it happen. He’ll refuse. When the big person in the sky, the one Father Kenneth at church always talks about, asks to take his hand, he’ll refuse, cross his arms, and sulk his way back to safety. He will never be ready.
He is always in charge of everything. School games, the toys he wants for Christmas, who he wants as friends; so why can’t he be in charge of what made his Uncle George sleep forever in the box? For the first time in his short, inquisitive life he feels completely powerless. He has been given everything he’s ever wanted in the whole world, and he is going to get this too...and that scares the living daylights out of him. He doesn’t want it to be black forever. He doesn’t like the dark. He hopes it is black for maybe a few hours and then you wake up somewhere you feel safe and bright and happy. You feel so content; you don’t miss your home, your best friends or your best toys. He asks the old people if they know if it is anything like what he wants it to be, they say yes. He doesn’t believe them. All he believes in, at this time, is the man lying silently in the box everyone is looking at. Uncle George. He tries to hear inside it; maybe he can hear the sound of happy things going on. Things he hopes happen once you fall asleep forever. He even leans in desperately hoping for the hint of an answer – none come.
He sits back and looks around. Everyone is crying. Dying isn’t only a sad thing for Uncle George, but he makes other people sad too. He looks down at his hands, now both sitting in his lap; he doesn’t want to make anyone else sad – ever. He imagines how a different group of people in years to come will be sitting here, crying. Instead though, he will be in the box, sleeping. He thinks about how everyone in this room is, one day, going to fall asleep and never wake up again. With that thought in mind, amid the other worries he has tried to decipher, tears begin to wet his young palms.
