Conversations about death

We experienced the loss of both our close friend Doug and my great aunt Monni at the end of August, and these deaths have resulted in a lot of questions from our curious little girl. As you may know, I lived through a lot of significant losses as a child (by the time I was 21 I had lost both of my parents and a sibling), and as a result of these losses I was drawn to study childhood grief for my major at Marlboro College and during my studies I became involved with the HEALS program, where I volunteered as a leader of grief groups for children in local schools. So I should be an expert on talking with kids about death, right? Well, not really. First, I am a bit rusty - it's been many years since I facilitated a children's grief support group. Secondly, when you are facilitating a group, the questions are confined to a set time and place.

In the case of Zoe, we carefully planned out how to tell her about these 2 losses and we read her an age appropriate book on the subject. From there on out, her questions have been flowing, and they often seem to come out of nowhere at times when you least expect it. She is regularly asking excellent, age appropriate questions that blow me out of the water.

For instance, when we first told her that these 2 people she knew had died, she asked to see pictures of them. I pulled out some pictures, but this was clearly not what she wanted to see. "Are they alive in these pictures, Mama?" "Yes..." "Well I want to see a picture of them when they are dead." Makes total sense, right? She has never seen a dead person, and she is curious. But from my perspective, how can I explain to her why we don't take pictures of dead people without making death sound yucky and scary? Along those same lines, the other day she asked me what dead people would look like if we went to the cemetery and dug them up. This resulted in an interesting conversation about compost. She also said recently, "Joshua doesn't have a daddy, but who else doesn't have a daddy?" (Joshua is our friend Doug's 3 year old son), so we proceeded to list people we knew, including both Lester and I, whose fathers were no longer living. Perhaps the clincher, a few nights ago during dinner, Zoe wanted to know which one of us was going to die first.

I find myself completely blindsided by her questions, since they come out of the blue, and I scramble to maintain my own composure and come up with a reasonable, age appropriate answer. No one ever said being a parent was easy...