Sitting in a snug booth at the local diner this past weekend, my younger daughter opted, while waiting for her sunny-side-up eggs to arrive and spooning the whipped cream from her hot chocolate into her mouth, to explore death.
?Your daddy?s dead?? she asked my husband, whose father died several years ago. My husband confirmed it: yes, his father is dead.
That wasn?t enough, of course. Did my husband know his daddy? Did he play with him? Live with him? Did he watch his daddy die?
Yes, yes, yes, and no. ?Why,? demanded our youngest son scornfully of his sister, ?why would you want to watch someone die??
?Well,? I ventured, ?you might ? I mean, if they were really old and ready and sick and ??
Fortunately, at that moment our food came. Because I?m not really sure where I was going with that. (And my husband?s father was none of those things.) But as Tim Kreider wrote for the Opinionator in his essay ?You Are Going to Die,? there are many, many reasons why I was right (if unsure how we were going to discuss it over eggs). Segregating the old and the ill ? segregating death ? ?enables a fantasy, as baseless as the fantasy of capitalism?s endless expansion, of youth and health as eternal, in which old age can seem to be an inexplicably bad lifestyle choice, like eating junk food or buying a minivan, that you can avoid if you?re well-educated or hip enough.?
My own father died at home, in what was once my childhood bedroom. He was, in this respect at least, a lucky man. Almost everyone dies in a hospital now, even though absolutely nobody wants to, because by the time we?re dying all the decisions have been taken out of our hands by the well, and the well are without mercy. Of course we hospitalize the sick and the old for some good reasons (better care, pain relief), but I think we also segregate the elderly from the rest of society because we?re afraid of them, as if age might be contagious. Which, it turns out, it is.
We are all, indeed, going to die. We rarely want to talk about it at breakfast, though, but maybe breakfast is the exact right time to talk about death, rather than in some after-school special kind of moment, perhaps accompanied by a specially selected picture book. We are all going to die and no one likes it but that?s the way it is, so savor those eggs.
I have no particular advice about talking to children about death, and no stories of the right way to watch a loved one die to share here (and I?m very happy that it should be so). My colleague, Catherine Saint Louis, has written about the ways children are increasingly involved in the grieving process when a family member dies in ?Letting Children Share in Grief.? It may be that when the conversation about death forces itself upon us, we are better at it (as a society) than we once were. But I read ?We Are All Going to Die,? and I thought about our conversation in the diner, and I thought, we ought to be more matter-of-fact about that, more often.
As we got up and left the table, leaving the debris of breakfast and colored, cocoa-covered paper place mats behind for someone else to clear up, a child?s voice drifted up from the table behind us. ?So,? it demanded, ?daddy?s mommy is dead, right??
Clearly the conversation itself is contagious. How do you talk with your children about death, and how have you helped them to have a better experience of inevitable grief?
Source: http://parenting.blogs.nytimes.com/2013/01/22/everybody-dies/
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