EDITOR’S NOTE: Grieving the death of a pet hits people hard. For some, I think it hits harder than losing a human relative. If you are interested in talking about the loss of a pet for a future edition, please share some details at the form I just linked.
Visit the Kids & Death section for more from this series. Career grief returns in our next edition.
There was a little blanket in the back corner of the room where calling hours for my former neighbor and Little League coach were being held. Two little girls, the granddaughters of the featured guest, played in the corner and their parents would duck out of the receiving line every so often to check on them. Aunts and uncles would come by to talk to them. You wouldn’t have noticed them if you weren’t looking.
My six-year-old is not as sedentary and so we made the choice to bring her early to my father-in-law’s wake. She was there for the family-only time (about 20 minutes) and left with my father and stepmother after the first 15 minutes of public time. While my wife’s cousins and YouTube would have entertained her for short periods, her default mode involves attaching herself to my wife’s side. The entirety of the calling hours would have been too much for her to handle.
Kids and death are a weird space. Traditionally, it’s been dictated by culture and religion, but parents play an important role as a teacher, filter and gauge for their child.
I was raised in an Italian-American family and death is an event for my people. I was a pallbearer for the first time when I was in fifth grade1 and remember going to wakes even before that. That was 35 years ago and I hate to sound like this, but things were different in the 1980s. Anxiety and depression hadn’t been invented. Parent-child relationships were less democratic; you didn’t dare tell your mother that you weren’t going to do something. Today, I have to bribe my youngest to flush the damn toilet when she’s done peeing, as if that’s acceptable culturally amongst suburban six-year-olds.
As previously discussed, my father-in-law’s passing was the first close family members to die since my youngest debuted on this earthly realm back in 2017. We made the choice to bring her to the very early part of his wake, but left her home for the funeral. Our oldest is 13 and, while she does everything in her power to be 28, she is still just 13. She is mature, for her age, but she doesn’t have the same life experience or scars that me or my wife possess from being around for 46 years2. Prior to her Papa’s death, she had not experienced loss3 and grief.
Since then, she has attended the services for two other people. She tagged along with my wife and me for the wake and funeral of a longtime family friend. Three weeks ago, I took her to the wake of her best friend’s grandmother. The two of them sat in front and talked, while I kept a chair warm in the back of the room. The friend’s father, whose mother passed, thanked me for coming and said he was surprised to see us. I explained that my daughter wanted to come and be the distraction and comforting friend that Brian Moritz’s daughter had been for her earlier in the summer. It was understood and appreciated.
We have never really had a talk about death with our children. It’s not like THE TALK™, which most families now rely on school health classes to dispense. There never seems to be a right time for it4. It’s not something you can do proactively, as that invites a billion questions and the potential for an endless stream of nightmares. The only time you really think to do it is when someone has died. At that point, you’re in such a lousy mood that it doesn’t matter if questions get asked.
We talked to both kids about what would come next — the wake, funeral, the endless stream of people saying they were sorry and “look how big you’ve gotten, I remember when you were a baby” — but we did it on their terms and at their level.
The three big things to remember…
Back in 2018, I wrote an article for Lifehacker’s parenting subsite about how to deliver bad news to kids. Much of it applies to the topic of death.
I turned to the mother of one of my daughter’s best friends for help. Cheryl Mayer is a licensed social worker in a school district in Syracuse, New York. She’s had to deliver news to children that their parent or friend has cancer or has died. In each situation, she listens, provides space for the child to process the information, and affirms that whatever reaction they might have is perfectly okay.
Answering a child’s question honestly is important—it teaches kids that you can be trusted and that they can feel safe asking questions. But Gesek says their age should dictate what comes next. You would talk to a 16-year-old differently than a kindergartner.
Mayer reflects on her own parenting in her approach. “Kids experience the greatest problems when we shelter them rather than helping them to understand,” she says. “I want my kids to experience disappointment and loss and frustration and anger and sadness and hurt while they are still children so they are better equipped to deal with all of that as adults.”
I want to take each of these items individually.
Be Honest, Offer Space
As parents, we provide the bubble of innocence for children around holidays and occasions with Santa Claus and the tooth fairy. We do our best to shut them out from the bile that swirls around them in the news. The death of a person they know is not one of those times for parental three-card monte. Honesty is key here; “Grandpa is going to heaven” may make you feel better, but it shields the child from the knowledge that the person died.
This is a moment for a parent to teach. If this is the first instance of death in the child’s world, you can help create a soft landing and instill a real definition of death with them. Ask if they know what it means for someone or something to die. Tell them that grandpa has died. Invite questions. If they don’t have any, let them know they can ask them whenever they want. Then, give them space.
Kids need to process information, especially the weighty stuff. You can see if they have questions, but they likely won’t. They will probably want to go play; a natural reaction to bad news will be to find pleasure in something else. While they are fiddling with their Legos, their brains are at work. They will come back and it’s incumbent on you to be ready.
Being honest and upfront helps your child become more resilient for the future.
Make it age appropriate
I don’t talk to my 13-year-old the same way I do to my six-year-old. When my father-in-law died, we took the oldest aside and explained to her that he had died earlier in the day. We asked if she wanted to talk about it. Predictably, she did not.
The conversation with our Little was different. We asked if she knew what it meant to die and we explained that Papa had died. She had lots of questions: Were you there? Was grandma there? Can I go see him? When can I see him again? Are you sad?
We answered them all, and then she went and played. Later, she came back with more.
Parents of toddlers can afford to be direct: Tell them that grandpa won’t be coming to Thanksgiving because they died. Young children are so literal that they are almost the easiest to work with. Most children age three and under don’t think in shades of gray. Emotionally, they might not know what it means to have a loved one die and that’s okay. There is plenty of time to adopt and work on the appropriate emotional reactions.
Parents of children in pre-K to elementary school should prepare for questions: This is the age of curiosity and inquiry. Their brains are being exposed to learning and they are absorbing everything around them. Accordingly, a new concept like death will invite questions. Not only should you expect questions, you should expect conversation about death. This is how they are adjusting to the topic being real in their life. Should you correct or dismiss it? Only if it’s inappropriate. It’s one thing for a child to tell their friend about a death; it’s another for them to role-play that they are dead like grandpa.
Death is part of the life cycle; they’re learning this at home every time you kill a fly or at school in science. By normalizing death, you can broaden the conversation and put the building blocks in place that will empower them to handle it going forward.
This is also the age where the idea of magical thinking comes into play. Six-year-olds are little egomaniacs and it’s possible that they will come away from the experience thinking they could have done something (or not done something) to cause the death. You’ll want to be prepared with more factual responses here and reassure them that they didn’t cause anyone to die.
Parents of children in middle or high school are looking for control: My oldest tried her hardest to be an adult during my father-in-law’s services. She inserted herself into conversations with her adult cousins and attached herself to my mother-in-law. The fact remained that she was still 13 years old.
She was seeking as much control over the situation as she could find. Every moment of those days (and the ones preceding and following) was about her controlling her world as she navigated this new concept and a world without her grandfather.
You can control some, but not all, of the variables
I want to repeat something my friend Cheryl told me for that Lifehacker article:
“Kids experience the greatest problems when we shelter them rather than helping them to understand,” she says. “I want my kids to experience disappointment and loss and frustration and anger and sadness and hurt while they are still children so they are better equipped to deal with all of that as adults.”
An aside. Earlier this year, the cop embedded in my youngest’s school visited her classroom to read this fucking book:
I was pissed off, and not in that Mom’s For Liberty sort of way. I was mad because this is what we’ve done to schools in our society. Rather than take common sense steps to reduce gun violence and school shootings, we have just accepted it as normal.
I’m still pissed, but I appreciate what the school is trying to do in using a tool to instruct so that they know what to do in a drill or in (God forbid) real life.
My long-winded point is that kids are resilient. Lockdown drills should scare the hell out of them — think about it, we’re doing this in case someone comes into the school with a gun trying to murder them — but it doesn’t. In fact, the lockdown drill has become regular business. My daughters handle this idea better than I do as their parent and an adult.
I’m not saying you should force your child to deal with death. But, they are surprising little creatures who can face it head on if we allow them. The most important thing you can take away from this is to meet your child where they are at their age level and where they exist emotionally.
Final thoughts on finality…
Nature’s first green is gold,
Her hardest hue to hold.
Her early leaf’s a flower;
But only so an hour.
Then leaf subsides to leaf.
So Eden sank to grief,
So dawn goes down to day.
Nothing gold can stay.
— Robert Frost, Nothing Gold Can Stay
Dirt Nap is the Substack newsletter about death, grief and dying that is written and edited by Jared Paventi. It’s published every Friday morning. Dirt Nap is free and we simply ask that you subscribe and/or share with others.
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More to come on that in our next edition of Kids & Death.
My wife is 87 days older than me.
Loss in the sense of death. She has experienced loss in friendships that have faded away; bonds that had been forged at young ages with people that she grew apart from. I think, for her, it hurt more to have them choose someone else over her than it did for the friendship to wither. But, I digress…
Death, not sex, although the case could be made for that one too.