Lucia and Saffron

“What are those cracks by your eyes, Mimi?”

My four-year-old granddaughter was staring intently at my face.

It took me a minute to compute.

“Wrinkles,” I said.

“Do I have wrinkles?” Lucia touched her own cheeks.

“No honey, you’re too young for wrinkles,” I said.

She thought for a few seconds. “When will I be dead?”

“Not for long time,” I said, metaphorically crossing my fingers and hoping this was true.

“I want to be dead,” she said, with a big grin on her face.

“Oh honey,” I replied, “Not yet…”

“I’ll be dead,” she persisted, “and then I’ll be alive again.”

I realized to Lucia death is like going to Disneyland. An alternate reality from which you can return. I wasn’t sure how to respond.

“I’m not sure it works that way,” I said. But she had already moved on. We ate apple slices and went to play in the park.

Several weeks later, Lucia asked where her Auntie Maya was.  I told her that Maya is dead. She persisted. But where is she? I said I wasn’t sure.

Being willing to admit we don’t know, especially to a child who loves and trusts us, can be challenging. I recently read an essay by Abby Sher, author of Amen, Amen, Amen: Memoir of a Girl who Couldn’t Stop Praying, in the New York Times “Private Lives” column.

Sher admits that she lied to her daughter, promising they could go visit her grandparents when, in fact, Sher’s parents had died before her daughter was born. She decides to tell her daughter the truth.

“I’m not sure what made me step over the threshold into Blatant Lie-ville,” Sher writes. “I don’t know what happens after death and I don’t think we’re supposed to know, but I was scared of telling my kid that.”

Telling children that death is “peaceful” or that their dead loved one is “in a better place,” leads to confusion in kids when what they feel in their hearts is anything but “peace” or “better.”

Sher and her husband come clean with their kid. Shortly after, a close friend of the family dies and the parents are again confronted with what to say. Their daughter asks them to show how much they will miss the dead woman, and Sher stretches her arms wide to indicate the hugeness of her grief.

Kids like things to be concrete. Often, they just want us to listen. Grief counselor Joseph Primo puts it this way: “The grieving need someone to say, “I see you, I hear you, I understand you are hurting and you can tell me more.” It’s a witnessing, as when a playful child demands, “Watch me on the monkey bars.”

Being a caring witness to the pain of a child’s grief can be difficult, Primo acknowledges. But as the director of Good Grief, a counseling center for grieving families in Morristown, NJ, that is his job. And as a grief recovery advocate, he is passionate about letting kids take the lead.

We don’t really have to tell kids how to grieve. We need to listen to them. And we need to be gentle and truthful about death and admit we don’t know all, or even any, of the answers.

We need to admit our “cracks” are actually wrinkles, that we are mortal and vulnerable, and that even when someone we love dies, the love goes on. Life goes on. So we eat apple slices and take our kids to the park.

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