There was a prayer I said with my mother:

Now I lay me down to sleep
I pray the Lord my soul to keep
If I should die before I wake
I pray the Lord my soul to take.

I learned it so young, the memory is part phonetic. "Lay me" was "layme", a comfortable-sounding word. I came to understand the prayer’s meaning after I learned to say the words. I realized that at least half of it dealt with what would happen if I died. How unthinkable, to a child. I was immortal, and stayed so for many years.

What was my mother thinking? Teaching her son a prayer that addressed death in his sleep? I have remembered the prayer, but it has always seemed impossible with my own children. That may be because I am one more generation away from the time when children died all the time. They were fragile, they died. There must have been so much pain. Did working the possibility into a nightly prayer help to cope?

Sad to say that bedside prayers with Dad never really caught on in this family, with this prayer or any others. But Mom’s layme prayer has come back to me. It fits a death-confronting adult pretty well - maybe it was never a child’s prayer at all.