Understanding death

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When my girls were babies, I kept notes about them - their progress, their behaviour, things they learned, funny things they did etc. I got the idea because my mother did the same when I was a baby - although unfortunately she scribbled the notes on scraps of paper and her hand-writing is rather difficult to read at the best of times, so I haven’t been able to decipher them all! Anyway I typed mine so they are easy to read. And when Little One had a birthday recently, she asked me to read her baby notes instead of the usual story we read in bed on weekend mornings. So we all snuggled up and read about her life, from when she arrived in the kitchen in the early hours of one morning up to her second birthday. This was all lovely and quite amusing, especially as she didn’t speak but instead she could get what she wanted (or argue about it) without words. She also loved to answer the telephone but of course would just hold the receiver without saying anything - I used to let her get on with it as it was useful to get rid of nuisance callers and genuine friends knew to hang on until I could get there! But one entry wasn’t so happy. When she was 22 months old we were visiting my 92-year-old father (known as ‘Taid’ - Welsh for Grandad) when he was suddenly taken ill with pneumonia and died within 3 days. Little One used to toddle in every morning with a big beaming smile for Taid, and he used to read her stories and sing her songs. The morning after he died she looked for him as usual and I explained that Taid was gone. She ‘asked’ (in that universal way of saying ‘where is something’ - holding out her hands) where he was, and I had to explain that he had gone forever, we would never see him again. I couldn’t really tell whether she understood, she didn’t say anything of course but she could see that we were all sad. She must have understood though because from that moment she never looked for him again. Have you had to tell a child about a death? What did you say and did they understand? All rights reserved. © Text and image copyright Fleur 2021.