Apocalypse Parenting Guide

Cormac McCarthy’s The Road: Parenting Guide for the Apocalypse

In our collective unconscious is a mythical end-of-the-world fear.  

Cormac McCarthy set his down as a nameless father and son. Prose as barren as the landscape it describes. We live the apocalypse and death is our utopia.

I would do anything for my boy, but I can’t do anything. This book is what that looks like.

Reading The Road during the 2020 Quarantine, I started making a list of things we would need to survive the next apocalypse, when I noticed the absurdity of listing my harmonica alongside cyanide tablets. Is art, philosophy, and music just a way of distracting ourselves until we eventually die, possibly at our own hands?

I can’t change the world, protect him from bad people, or make food out of nothing. I can’t even stop myself from being the horrible hypocrite I must stop being. I am the disease, and I have passed it on to him, hoping he will do better. That’s all we parents want, but it is a vain hope. Hope is a lie. Truth is pain. How do we reconcile the two? Give you my harmonica.

The child has no use for nostalgia. The child adjusts. Normal is what they are used to, even if it is apocalyptic. My six-year-old son never mentioned the masks they wore or the plexiglass shields around the desks in his kindergarten.

The boy is the man’s moral compass, as my son is mine. He is the reason I’m watching my weight, and try to count to three before I react in anger. He sees things I don’t see, like refuge and compassion. He is a messianic figure as the father is saved by giving his everything to the boy. Because of him, tomorrow matters.

I won’t make it with you all the way down that road, so what can I do? Teach you to build a fire. Show you how to be a good person, even when I’m not. Make myself a good person, so I can show you, so that when you have to go on without me, you will be able to, and know how to, even though there is no way to plan for that.

I cried like I have not cried in some time at the end of the book. A truly cathartic release. I got to experience my own death at the end of an apocalyptic plague, and I am a better person for it, maybe a better husband and father too.

I am the father, but I am also the boy. I saw my father die, he wasn’t perfect either, far from it, but I never forgot the lessons he taught me, and neither will my son. I just have to make the lessons worth learning and with luck, maybe I’ll have a long time to teach him, but time is a luxury that I can’t ask for. All we have is right now.

Hell on Earth or no hell on earth, all we have is right now.