Love You Forever by Robert Munsch & Sheila McGraw

I don’t re-read books very often as I think it’s a deeply suspicious thing to do.

A sign of a closed mind…

Of a weak, uninquisitive, trapped and small individual…

A suggestion of limited personhood…

A person who would watch Palm Springs or Groundhog Day or Russian Doll and think, yeah, a time loop sounds fun because the frustrations of repetition outweigh the fears of the unknown…

It’s the act of a person who says “I yearn for the familiar because I am scared of the new.”

I once chatted to a person who worked in pest control (because I was managing a venue that was filled with rats – they would skip about in the gaps between the floors and in the basement office (where I would count cash at 5am and build rotas, hungover, on weekday afternoons while my hair rapidly fell out) and I would often see their bald, scabby, wrinkled tails falling through holes in the ceiling, almost certainly inhaling the piss and the shit that they dropped onto the crumbling plasterboard above me) and he told me that rats have a phobia of the new.

The pest controller did use the Latin/Greek term (I don’t know which ancient language is the basis of the words we use for “phobias” as my education was free (and equally as pointless as learning things like that (knowing phobias, knowing the nouns for groups of animals, that kinda thing))), and explained that this was one of the reasons why rats are so hard to get rid of once they’re in a building: they will ignore traps, suspicious of anything that appears in a space they believe is theirs…

Only when the rat population reaches the point where it’s impossible for them all to skirt all traps and some of them start imbibing the poison and bringing in back to the nest and then dying and then getting eaten by their rat family, will the poison start to spread and the problem start to fade.

Yes. That is what re-reading books is like.

But I’ve read this one several times. And every time it hits me like an emotional brick to the neck.

Robert Munsch is a Canadian (I think) children’s author and, with a Canadian partner and therefore a half-Canadian baby (who is simultaneously half-Canadian but also, technically, a whole Canadian and a whole English (dual nationality stacks rather than extends), Canadian children’s books are in the home.

I’ve read a few books written by this guy, Robert Munsch (this one is illustrated by Sheila McGraw), and most of them are onomatopoeia-riddled playful pieces with lots of counting and numbers, lots of repetition and lots of cheeky, misbehaving children.

They’re fun, they’re fine, and as I reread each of them to my small child I am, Stockholm Syndrome-like, getting more attached to them.

But, ultimately, the other Robert Munsch books I’ve read are light, are playful, and are – ultimately – lacking in any real world emotional nuance.

That’s not the case here.

Love You Forever is one of the most emotionally devastating pieces of short fiction I’ve ever encountered in my life, and on all of the three or four occasions I’ve read it, I have cried like a train and been unable to read the whole thing aloud to my baby. (Thankfully my baby is too young to have a need for narrative resolution, so cannot really tell that the story never gets to the end when the words switch from my voice to my internal monologue. I say that, but that’s a lie – I know this book is too upsetting for me so have never tried to read it aloud to little Whamathan as I have a need for narrative resolution and don’t want to contribute towards normalising that for the junior family member.)

What’s Love You Forever about and why does it hit so hard?

It opens with a new parent singing a song to her newborn child.

It then races through childhood with the mother repeatedly singing the song to the boy as he gets older and weirder and more independent, and then even singing it to him as an adult when he has a home of his own.

Then, there is a switch, and – as his mother ages – the boy (now a man) sings it to her as she lies in what is sure to be her deathbed, before he returns to his home and sings the song, in a full and devastating circle, to his own newborn child. And that’s it.

It’s a five to ten minute illustrated story aimed at children that clarifies the circularity and rhythms of life, the horror yet inevitability and normalcy of mortality and ageing, yet the possibilities for love and care and connectedness that do exist.

It’s meaningful and serious, it’s heartbreaking and it’s sad, though hopeful and human and big.

It makes me think that maybe it might make sense to live a bit longer if life can be filled with love… That maybe living can be worthwhile and pleasant, instead of the loveless misery I was mis-raised to believe I deserved, inescapably…

It makes me mourn for my younger, sadder, self, who didn’t – and couldn’t – believe that the world could be kind, could be worth living in and could be made to suit a person within it. But I suppose that if I’d been better adjusted I’d have never pet that pest controller and the above metaphor wouldn’t have existed…

Love You Forever is a sad, serious, beautiful piece of literature and every time I read it, it devastates me. And whether that’s because of the unhappiness in my past or the possible (hopeful!) happiness in my future, I don’t know.

Highly recommended. Beautiful stuff. Yes. Yes. Yes.