- April 15, 2025
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While I was playing a game of basketball with my 6-year-old son, Luke, in the backyard, I failed to notice a lizard until it was too late. Maybe it had camped out on the rim and been squished by the ball? It appeared to be injured — or molting? Do lizards like this molt?
Refusing to confront the concept of mortality just yet, I flicked the lizard, a brown anole, into the grass with the side of my shoe, and we continued our basketball game.
(In case anyone is wondering, Luke won, 30-29.)
But then, I saw the lizard again; it had somehow dragged itself back onto the patio — and died.
It was a gory sight: leaking black goo from its side, its right hind leg shriveling before our very eyes.
“Whoa,” Luke and I said in unison, hovering over the lizard.
Then Luke grew quiet. His shoulders slumped. He went inside, his high tops clomping with a clumsy mournfulness.
I followed him in and tried to forget about the lizard. I sat on the couch with my 10-year-old daughter, Kennedy. I was answering emails on my phone when I heard Kennedy, in her best big-sister scolding voice:
“Luke!” she said. “Go wash your hands!”
There he stood, smiling, but not for long. He thought he had done a grand thing: In his hand, he held the dead lizard, in a Ziploc baggie. A strange, tragi-comic gesture of respect toward this unliving thing.
“Yes,” I said, agreeing with Kennedy, “go wash your hands.”
“I’m trying to,” he said mysteriously. He disappeared down the hallway, toward the bathroom.
A few minutes later, we heard the toilet flush.
Kennedy and I looked at each other.
She said, in a hushed voice: “Did he just … ?”
Without waiting for me to respond, she jumped off the couch to investigate, although no matter why the toilet had flushed, there was no going back.
But he hadn’t flushed the lizard; he had just used the bathroom himself. He had put the lizard, in its flimsy, transparent body bag, on a shelf in his bedroom.
“I want to keep it,” he said.
“I don’t think so,” I said.
“I want to keep it,” he repeated. “It’s so sad.”
I imagined the dead lizard rotting for years on his shelf, stinking up the house.
“Go get it and dump it in the woods,” I said.
Dutifully, he walked away, head down. At the edge of the far end of the yard, he opened the baggie and dropped the lizard into the tall grass. He slowly walked back and sat next to me on a patio chair.
I thought about the many ways we lose our innocence as we grow up. Was this a moment he would remember forever? Or perhaps a moment that would impact him in ways he might not ever realize? I knew the sick knot he had in his stomach; I had one too. How could I help him to transform that feeling into something more manageable?
“How about if we learn about lizards?” I asked.
He agreed, and we went back inside. He chose a YouTube video about chameleons and cast it on the TV.
In slow motion, the exotic lizard crouched and launched its tongue out into space, snatching an insect off a branch.
To Kennedy, it was not a learning experience but a pure gross-out. “That’s awful,” she said.
“Do you feel some closure?” I asked Luke.
He nodded. “A little bit.”
I felt that I had accomplished something great as a parent. I had helped my son turn his mysterious grief into a quest for knowledge.
On second thought, I asked: “Do you know what closure means?”
“No,” he said.
But apparently it was OK. He had found another source of comfort and wisdom: The next suggested YouTube video, come what may.
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