It’s a topic we’d all rather avoid, and sooner or later, it’s one we all have to confront. How do you talk to your children about the ultimate fact of life? Sometimes, all it takes is a line on a TV show to get the conversation started.
I’ve been faced with all sorts of questions over the last 17 years of parenting: ‘What is photosynthesis?’ ‘Why do cats purr?’ ‘Where do babies come from?’ ‘Why is Donald Trump’s face orange?’
For most of them, I have an answer. The answer to where babies come from is obviously Father Christmas.* For questions I can’t answer, there’s always either Google or my husband – our very own human-Google.
There’s one question for which Google proves inadequate, though:
‘What happens when we die?’
The topic came up in a recent episode of a TV series I’m watching, when an uncle talks to his little nieces about death and horrifies them by flippantly announcing, “Everybody dies, including you and mommy and daddy.”
My sister, Belinda, died almost three years ago. Even though we were expecting it, it was still the most crushingly awful thing that had ever happened to me. I know: I didn’t die, she did. But I lost my best friend, my side-kick, and my greatest fan.
Watching that TV character exchange forced me to consider my avoidance of the topic with own kids. They’ve asked the question in different ways over the years, and we’ve had the conversations, but the subject has been closed to a large extent since we said goodbye to Belinda and to their granddad who died 7 months after she did.
I can’t answer the question of what happens when we die, because all I know when I think of Belinda and my dad is that they’re gone. I don’t believe they’re looking down fondly on us, or meeting up somewhere celestial, or – one of my pet-peeves – on a journey. They’re just not there.
It’s an unpleasant topic for all of us, my kids included, but after watching the cringe-worthy discussion on TV, I steeled myself to broach the subject with them.
What I discovered is that, at this stage, their concerns are less about what happens when we die and more about the present. Kids 1 and 2, for example, reminded me that, aside from dealing with their own grief, they both had concerns about the impact their loved ones’ death would have on our lives. They were worried that their gran and I wouldn’t be “the same” now that Belinda and my dad were no longer around – that we’d be too sad to function and that we’d forget how to have fun.
Their take on the topic these days is very similar to mine: it’s an unpleasant thing to think about (Kid 3 asked why you’d want to think about death at all, which sparked another useful conversation about mortality) and they hadn’t properly considered it before their loved ones died. They’re still dealing with their grief in their own ways, just like me. And just like me, they have their own beliefs around death: Kid 2 believes they’re together now in Heaven, while Kids 1 and 3 don’t.
The greatest benefit of having this conversation with my kids, though, was the realisation that I don’t have to fear a question I can’t answer. My kids are growing and with that, comes the formation of their own opinions. So when we’re faced with a difficult issue and Google is found lacking, we can just turn off the computer and have a heart-to-heart that might help us answer the question, or it might not.
What will certainly happen, though, is that, rather than avoiding a difficult subject, we’ll have connected over it and tackled it together. And that’s worth more to me than finding the definitive answer to a question.
* Answers to the Trump question on a postcard, please…
Leave a Reply