There are conversations that you anticipate as a parent. You know they will be awkward and difficult. You may know going into it that you do not have any good answers. You may be a touch resentful that these topics were not discussed with you in your own childhood with adequate detail and care. However, no matter how these topics were discussed with you, you are bound and determined to be prepared. If they were well discussed in your childhood, you are going to continue the tradition. If they were poorly discussed, you are going to break the cycle. You know these discussions are coming and you are going to make sure you are darn well prepared. You are not going to let your child see you ill-prepared, caught off guard or embarrassed. After all, you are the parent and parents are not vulnerable like that.
Before you even become a parent, you plan out these discussions. You do the research way before there is even a child sitting in front of you. You have every conversation mapped neatly in the hypothetical situation in which it would occur with a hypothetical age of your hypothetical child attached to it. You are sure to make one for every “#difficult topic” there is: Sex, Consent and Sexuality updated to be inclusive of all Gender Identities, Religion and Spirituality including both the practical and metaphysical, the Proper Role of Government and Communities and why one should not stand in for the other, and, recently added, How to Ensure Personal Safety in a country of Militarized Police, Fascist Mob Violence and Litigious Inequity.
But you forget one. One that is so important, so basic and so primal. One that happens so early you’re tempted to think it has happened too early. One that was the very first darkness in a world filled with leaving treats out for the fairies that take care of the houseplants and planning birthday bashes for inner circle of Stuffies. One that is a proper developmental milestone and affected you so profoundly and deeply, but happened so early in your own childhood that it was completely not on your mind while you were making your list. One you didn’t plan for, one that happened in real time, when you child was not a hypothetical child, but a real child, having a real developmental moment right in front of you, watching you with uncertain eyes, waiting for your response. The response that will “fix” it for them, that will make it all make sense and take away the anxiety that provoked the question.
Intellectually, you know its coming. You learned about it in college classes about human development long before there was real child before you or even a hypothetical child in your head. We know from research on human development that “children begin to gain an awareness of death between the ages of 3-5 depending upon their life events and exposure.”(1) Some sources put this process as beginning as early as age 2, but the general consensus is that after infancy and before elementary school, children will “begin to use the word 'dead' and develop an awareness that this is different to being alive.” (2) However, what children of this age do not understand are “abstract concepts like 'forever' and cannot grasp that death is permanent.”(2) As with everything else in the world around them, they are exploring it and trying to learn what it is all about. Children cannot help but learn; it is what they were built to do. You know that your child turned three in March 2023 and for the past seven months has been sporadically reacting to statements about death, such as becoming upset when someone says a toy “died” and stating “I no want to die” when someone talks about the potential lethal consequences of an action. You have even been more mindful not to use terms of death and dying casually so as to not upset the child.
There is really no excuse for it to have caught you off guard, other than you just did not want to process how quickly your child is growing up. In hindsight it makes perfect sense; a recent transition into preschool, in which your child has been learning to function in parental absence, and in the wake of the pogrom a week and a couple days earlier, in which, even though he was not directly affected or fully aware of what happened, he had classmates who lost people and classmates who were displaced. Though it may surprise many adults, children talk to each other, even if adults may keep things from them, they still compare notes.
And if you are starting to think that this post just went from a general discussion to something oddly specific and seemingly personal, you are right.
I should have started preparing my conversation the moment I noticed that someone saying a toy was “dead” upset him, but denial is a powerful thing. Instead, I was caught so blindsided on the evening of 10/16/2023 that, initially, I did not even know what he meant.
So there I was, doom scrolling on the phone, when he suddenly stops playing with his Number Blocks, looks me straight in the eyes and says, “Mama, what if you left me?”
Not being great at the impromptu, there was a really long awkward pause.
Assuming this was related to his main stressor at the time, school transition, I totally missed the mark. Technically, I had been “leaving” him every school day, a quick fist bump in the morning after some affirmations and I was driving away, leaving him to his own devices. So I went with the low hanging fruit, “Little One, Mommy and Daddy have to leave you sometimes. We always leave you in a safe place, with safe adults. We always come back at the end of the day … but if you don’t feel safe you can always tell us.”
The response was a deflated “Ok” as he turned to go back to his toys.
He was obviously not satisfied. Then it hit me, he meant what if I Left, with a capitol “L” Left, like left this Life. The good thing about parenting, you can always course correct. “Honey, Mommy might have misunderstood you, did you mean what if Mommy were to leave you and not come back? If Mommy were to die?”
I got a little nod. Unsure of what to say, I gave him a hug. After a minute, I figured I would go back to reassurance, but just a different kind. “If Mommy and Daddy were to pass away while you were still little, you would stay with either your Grandparents or your Uncle and Aunt, and they would take care of you. You would be sad, but you are smart, resourceful and determined. You would be Okay. You would still play and grow up. You would remember Mommy and Daddy, even if we aren’t with you.”
That seemed to be what he was looking for, I got another hug and he went back to playing. I went back to doom scrolling. The world continued spinning on its axis.
Was I too candid? Did I just confuse him by going beyond where he was developmentally? Did I do more harm than good? That may be for his future therapist to help him decide, but, as with most parenting, I did the best I could at the time.
I am generally of the opinion that my role as a parent is not to protect my child from the unhappy realities of the world, but prepare him to face them. Humans have an amazing capacity for Goodness balanced with a tremendous capacity for, well, Evil, though I do not particularly like reducing it to such a false dichotomy. If my child goes into adulthood with the expectation that those around him will only ever make choices with pro-social outcomes I would be doing him a tremendous disservice. An essential part of being able to stay safe in this world is to realize that those around you can and will actively choose to cause you harm. They may make this choice because it benefits them or because serves their own constructed narrative of who they are and who they believe you to be.
With a little thought, tough topics can be adapted for younger ages and, even if you end up failing miserably, the mere attempt to have discussion about a tough topic with a child in a way that they understand helps so much more than simply sheltering it away from them. Will his future therapist agree with me? Maybe not, but I am used to the vast majority of people not agreeing with my opinions.
An Open and Ongoing Dialogue
As with all developmental milestones, it is not just one and done. A child is not going on a 30 mile hike immediately after the first time they pull themselves up on the coffee table, and, unfortunately, children are not instantly potty trained after the first time they use the toilet.
This is a process that begins with awareness of Death and evolves from there. The child develops an increasing capacity to understand abstract concepts and increased life experience provides them with more information to add into those evolving concepts. In general, “at six to nine years of age, children generally understand that death is final and they will not see the person again.”(1) It is normal for children who have faced early losses to “to re-process what has happened as they develop awareness of the finality of death.”(2) Developing an understanding of Death is, somewhat ironically, a life long process. While we become aware of Death and even our own personal mortality early on in life, “it is the rare individual who has processed the reality of their mortality nor do any of us truly understand the nature of death.”(1) Even as adults, we understand Death only with the terms that we have within the capacity that we have developed. All roads lead to the destination that we understand the least.
The Little One has been continuing his journey through this milestone. Our first conversation opened up the topic, he had questions about relatives who had passed when he saw them in pictures and questions about people that he heard about who had passed. He saw a picture of the dog I had as a child and had questions as to why the dog had passed even though we were “little” around the same time. I explained that, in normal circumstances, humans live longer than dogs and a lot of other animals that would be kept as pets.
Sadly, one month after his birthday this year, he gained some first hand experience when my father z”l passed away. He was able to articulate that the funeral was to “Say Goodbye to Grandpop” and he made a card. However, from the excited way he ran through the door and into the living room the first time he returned Grandma and Grandpop’s house after the funeral, he definitely seemed to expect to see Grandpop sitting in his normal place on the couch and was visibly taken aback when Grandpop was not there. He kept this to himself during the visit, even though he very notably checked all the rooms in the house, including the closets.
He eventually started talking about it. It started out small, just an “I miss Grandpop” every once in awhile. Then it progressed to specific questions, which I attempted to answer with the answers that I had.
It started with the question “Why couldn’t Grandpop stay?” which lead to a discussion that everyone has a body and a neshama. When a body becomes too badly damaged by injury or age the neshama can no longer stay in the body and the stroke that Grandpop had damaged his body so much that his neshama could not stay, even though he wanted to. In other conversations we talked about burying the bodies of those that we love to honor them and how we say Mourner’s Kaddish to help the person’s neshama, and our own, through the transition. The conversations where short as he is only four. There was often a lot of time between them, so it seemed like he was processing in between. I ended up ugly crying after or during most of them, but that’s grief. Did he really fully understand any of the answers? Probably not, but it is the discussion that is important. It is the fact that he could ask the questions that he would remember and that nothing was really hidden from him.
My Own Journey
One thing that I did not expect about parenthood is the amount of introspection you are sometimes genuinely forced to do. You cannot understand where your own child is coming from unless you really understand where you are coming from. Are you projecting your own issues onto them? Are they triggering things that you have yet to resolve? Are you just blindly following the example your parents were for you or are you actually addressing the situation at hand?
While I am not sure if my Little One has realized his own mortality yet, I actually remember when I realized mine. I was still three, but almost four, and three of the five great-grandparents that I knew and had a relationship with had passed. One of my great-grandfathers had passed earlier in the week and I had two remaining great-grandmothers. They had all passed from just old age; there was not any large disaster or serial killer gunning for the elderly or anything like that. I remember still feeling sad and, after I got comfy in bed that night, I did a little morbid process of elimination in my head in the very child-like terms of trying to figure out who would pass after my great-grandmothers did, not really knowing that death is not entirely age-based. Who after great-grandparents? … well, grandparents. Then who after grandparents? … well, parents. I had been sad the whole process, but this is was the level where the fear started coming in. Then who after parents? … well, uh … probably, maybe … me. Uh-oh. Cue a sobbing, screaming three-year old running down the stairs many hours after bed time making little to no sense being completely inconsolable. My Mom did not really say much, she just cuddled me until I was calm enough to be put back in bed. I did not sleep though, I just sobbed all night. Nothing could really make it better and I found I could not just “un-think” it. I was forever changed and could not go back to how I was before.
In elementary school, I became a really frustrating kid. If death is inevitable and sad, why be happy now? What is the point in doing anything now if we’ll all be dead later? My parents were probably pretty worried, but I did grow out of it.
Kinda.
I’m still working on finding a satisfying answer, but so is everyone really.
I was fortunate in that I was born early enough to meet and have a relationship with most of my great-grandparents. My son only met one of his great-grandparents once and she was living a few states away when she passed. He knew but was not particularly shaken. His other great-grandparents he knows only from stories. My father z’’l was really his first close loss. As I am helping him through his experience, I have to remind myself that our experience is not the same despite him being a similar age to my age then. I have to meet him where he is at, not where I was at when I was his age.
Eventually it will happen. One night, he’ll put it together. He’ll reflect on his great-grandmother whom he met once becoming a story, like all his other great-grandparents, then his grandfather becoming a story as well and he’ll realize his other grandparents will become stories, then his parents and, eventually, he will also become a chapter in someone else’s ancestral lore. Despite being someone who plans conversations years in advance, I honestly do not know what I would say to make it better. I’ll probably just cuddle him and put him back to bed, maybe quote Dr. Who.
“We're all stories, in the end. Just make it a good one, eh?” Dr. Who, 11th Doctor, The Big Bang (2010) (3)
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