Saying Good-Bye to a Friend

We had a sad incident in our home last night. Tom and I were busy organizing the computer room, throwing out and planning to sell most of the books and papers from his time spent at NAU. While in the process of this the boys were playing around the house. They are well behaved and rarely do we have major discipline issues with them, but I suspected something when I smelled burning. Went into the kitchen to see if someone had accidentally or purposely turned on the stove, but no, nothing. I mentioned it to Tom and the smell was placed onto a neighbors head. We live in an apartment building so when your neighbor decides to smoke pot, we all smoke pot! So we shrugged our shoulders and got back to work, I didn’t notice the smell again. An hour later I hear Tom in the boy’s bedroom quite upset and then see him walk out of the room with a grossly burned Spiderman in his hand, and Talin in the hallway with eyes that look as though they’ll pop out of his head. I immediately know what’s happened; now it was time to get the confession. Talin fessed up immediately. “Talin, did your brother have any part in this?” I see the hesitation as he looks over at Collin, “No mom, I did it all, I wanted my room to be dark, so I put Spiderman on the light”. After the confession comes, the tears pour out. I knew there was no need to inflict punishment, it was enough that his favorite toy for the past two years, Spiderman who had slept with him, accompanied him on many trips, had passed. I mentioned that he had killed Spiderman, and the sobs poured out. I shouldn’t have said that he killed him, but I couldn’t snatch my words back, and I thought maybe he needed to hear that. The fear of ruining friends and possibly burning down our home was drilled into those boys. And after it all happened I felt such a sigh of relief and gratefulness towards the Lord. He allowed Spiderman to slowly burn over a light bulb for over an hour with never catching fire. Thank you. Some of the sad things Talin said last night were enough to break my heart and bring my own tears. I’m a girl who knows how much you can love a toy as a child; I had many myself that were best friends. So when Talin said things like, “do you think Spiderman will miss me?” or “I will miss Spiderman, will he find other toy friends at the dump?” in his shaky, sobbing voice, I almost broke myself. The farewell was hard, but a lesson was learned, and will never be forgotten.
And on another sad note, my beautiful crystal bowl that I received from Tiffany’s as a wedding present broke last night. Talin and I both learned a hard lesson that evening, you really have to take care of your stuff. It was a hard evening of farewells.