the days keep coming
Once again I’m humbled by a child. And this one’s not even mine.
One of the questions I get most often is how on Earth we can help our children to be “OK” with death. Or words to that effect. Like so many oft-repeated questions, it’s not quite the right one. It implies that I’m “OK” with death, for one thing, and I am NOT. It also implies that, when it comes to consideration of death, kids are in a more delicate position than adults.
Pfft!
An adult comforting a child about death is like a terminal cancer patient trying to make the guy next to him in the waiting room feel better about his restless legs syndrome. Prior to age eight, and often long afterwards, kids do not have a firm concept of the finality of death. And there’s the golden opportunity: get them pondering death while it’s a fuzzy shape on the horizon, before they really, truly get the purpose and inevitability of that swinging scythe.
But the traditional approach has been to shield kids from it during the very stage in which they could do some of their best and least fearful grappling. Then, once they’re old enough to grasp it more fully, they are blindsided by their first major encounter. Granny-in-a-box, perhaps. For me it was age thirteen, and my dad in the casket at 45 — the age I turned this morning, in fact.
Heh. I’m OK.
PBB contributor Kendyl Gibbons recommends emphasizing the continuity of life as one of her five affirmations in the face of death. The realization that life itself continues after the death of one person can be both comforting and something of a revelation for kids.
Like most such revelations, we don’t often have to feed it to them. A wondering child will find his or her way to it. Regular MoL visitor Jim Lemire dropped me a reminder that the youngest kids are capable of grappling with death in a subtle and profound way. Here’s Jim’s son Jack, three-and-a-half, discovering the continuity of life all by himself:
You know, days do keep coming even after you die. We know people who have died and the days still keep coming. So after we die, the days will keep coming.
Don’t look to adults for anything half that profound.
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(Thanks to Jack’s mom Linda B. for the original post!)