Handling children's questions about dying honestly and succinctly can ease their fears, writes EDEL MORGAN
WHEN MY SONS aged five and three started to ask questions last year after the sudden death of my father-in-law, my first inclination was to spare them any upset by assuring them we would all live forever. Instead, I used heaven as a way of softening the blow by making it sound like a wonderful place where granda was having a whale of a time.
Recently my five-year-old enquired whether granda sleeps on a cloud or in a bed in heaven. I went for the cloud option, but after a pause he said, “But that doesn’t make sense, he’s too heavy for a cloud, he’d fall through it”.
After a raft of questions about whether I’d been to heaven, and how I knew there was a heaven if I’d never been there, I quickly began to realise that too much soft-soaping doesn’t work. Children will pick holes in a story that doesn’t add up. While I wouldn’t dismiss the possibility of an afterlife, I might have gone into too much detail about a place I’ve never seen.
My husband, whose mother died suddenly when he was nine, took a more forthright approach and just told them the truth in a way they could understand: everyone dies.
But how best to answer the questions of very young children without burdening them with too much realism?
Psychologist David Carey says honesty is the best policy and you should answer them succinctly. “Only answer the question, don’t go beyond that,” he says.
It’s best to just come out with it, he adds. “You could say, ‘When someone dies, they stop breathing. They don’t come back to life and after the funeral, you won’t see them again. Death is final.’ It can be incredibly difficult because we have enormous difficulty with it,” he says.
Children are aware of death before we know it, he adds. “They see dead animals, birds, or a pet might die. Death is a taboo subject. No one likes to talk about it and there’s a tendency to change the subject and not be morbid. But our level of distress and discomfort communicates to the child.”
It is important to avoid euphemisms, such as telling a young child that God took the person or he’s up with the angels, which can be confusing and distressing for them. They might wonder whether God or the angels will take them too. “It is important to communicate the finality of it, that when people die they don’t breathe again,” he says.
How you explain things depends on their age. Those under two years don’t understand the concept of death, he explains. “They have magical thinking and think death is reversible,” he says. “When they are between five and nine years old, most children are beginning to realise death is final, though they often don’t see it as personal. They may think they can escape it with their own ingenuity.”
By 10 they know it is irreversible, that all things die and they too will die. Teenagers can be drawn to the dark side reading books and watching movies on the topic. Carey says there’s nothing wrong with bringing heaven into the equation if your family genuinely believes in it. “It’s very hard to sustain stories about things you don’t believe in,” he says.
His view is that most children are resilient and will work through it. “You have to be careful [as vulnerable children] might take everything you say as fact, so it’s best to explain it as succinctly as you can,” he says.
Sheila O’Malley of Practical Parenting knows from experience it can be difficult for a bereaved person to deal with a child’s questions. She was a child when her father died and her mother coped with the situation by not talking about it.
“Mum thought she was doing the best, but we felt we couldn’t go to her,” she says. “If you can’t process [the in- formation] and go beyond it, it gets repressed and you carry it with you. It impacts on your behaviour and how you interact with people. You are left with feelings of it not having been dealt with.”
Answering a child’s questions truthfully gives them huge security and reassurance, as long as you don’t overload them with detail. “What a parent needs to do is to receive the child’s feelings. In some cases, a child loses one parent and then loses the other as well because they are emotionally unavailable,” she says.
When you lose a parent, there’s a feeling of abandonment at a subconscious level, she notes. “Dad took his life in the States,” he says. “There was no funeral, so an oak tree was planted in his honour. It’s the only thing we have in his honour and to this day I love trees.”
When a close family member dies, she says, you have a choice: face the grief and begin the journey or bury it.
“Rituals help us to grieve and are very good as they help a child to understand the finality and permanence of death, but I wouldn’t force a child to go [to a ceremony] if they didn’t want to.”
