Cherished

Back when my lad (now 20, and about whom I still say: "This is my beloved son, in whom I am well pleased...") was about 5 and I was putting him to bed, I had just finished reading an email from a fellow expatriate here. It contained a book review on something dealing with anecdotal material from witnesses to SS atrocities in Poland. A former villager told of seeing an SS guy strolling casually down the alley or street or road, whistling merrilly as he dangled a just still living and moaning infant on the tip of his bayonette, its last breath still audible to the witness. I sat stock still. I was, needless to say, so deeply upset at reading this, so traumatized because no matter how much material you take in – and I'd already imbibed a very, very great deal – it whacks you over that cliff of the most terrible distress, every time. Every time. So now I gotta put my laddy to bed. We sat in the near pitch dark room.  Rather than singing or playing, I was dead silent. Being a child, he sensed my sadness.

In his half-Doitch, half-English, he asked me what was wrong. Of course telling him anything like this was completely out of the question, but I had to be straight with him. I replied, "Well, hon', Papa is just very very sad right now." Asking me why, I replied again, "Sometimes there are others in the world, children, yes also children, who suffer or have suffered such things I cannot tell you, and your Papa is just too sad about it not to be sad." He wanted to comfort me.

So I did what actually wasn't our habit, but also not unheard of: I said, "Let's put our hands together here, you put yours together and then mine over yours, so... And Papa is going to pray, and this will be your little bed-time prayer, just yours." And I began, "My Beloved Lord and Cherisher, may all children everywhere be as loved, and as cherished, and as safe and secure as me."

In German there is no one word for cherish, except in cherishing an idea or a wish. To cherish a person is conveyed in a phrase, and my German idioms were less up to it at that time. While the sweet sound of our word, cherish, no doubt from the French cher, is to endear – we all know it conveys something more than words, notwithstanding a popular single on the charts back in the mid-'60s.

My little son asked me in his 5-year-old attempt at a new English word, "Was ist 'chewish'?"

I told him, "Well, you know what it is to love someone a whole lot, like how your Papa loves you, right? Cherish is something totally – lile you could never imagine livng without that one, ever. It's like....this:"

And I proceeded to give him pecks on the skin of his back, along the shoulders and between the shoulder blades, each kiss a dry and tender covenant of everlasting love toward my own child, each kiss a protection, a prayer for his well-being. After a few of these, I said, "Cherish is like...that. Okay? Now to bed with you."

We sat there a moment, in the dark – or I sat, he leaned over my arm some. And then he said, "Chewish me again."

And of course, I did.

I cherish him now as I ever have, and I will always have his back.