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My friend shared a phrase with me, and it so perfectly encapsulates my feelings about needing to talk with children about death in this year, this unreal year, this cataclysmic year, this year where, as of this moment, over 255,000 people have died of a disease that didn’t exist a year ago.
What’s the phrase? Peak 2020. Peak 2020 is that I need to talk to my children about my father’s 1988 suicide death, because the time has come when not talking about it is becoming more of a problem than a help. Peak 2020 is that I need to have this conversation with the background of great loss: The compounded losses of normalcy, in-person peer relationships, typical elementary schooling, hugs of people outside our immediate family.
I have been the person avoiding talking about my father’s death; my children, I have learned, are very comfortable talking about death. Children—not just my own—notice death everywhere. They notice a dead squirrel on the street; a dead millipede in our basement; leaves that have died and fallen off trees. My children know about human death because we have, sadly, lost children and elders in our community. They know a lot about death because of the COVID-19 pandemic; they know the reason we are staying home is to keep people safe and alive.
I think part of me wished that I didn’t need to also talk about my father’s death this year. But, I needed to; my son is about to turn 8 and is old enough to understand both death generally and suicide specifically. My daughter, at 5-and-a-half, still talks about a baby who died in our community last year; she is sensitive to the sadness and grief of others in an incredible way that I didn’t realize small children could be.
So when I sat down to tell my son that I once had a different father than the person he knows as my father, I was as ready as I’d ever be. I found two pictures from my babyhood: One of my mom, dad, and me, just a day or so old. And one of my dad holding baby me. I said to my son, “Who is this, in the picture?” He named my mother, and guessed that the baby was me. Then he said, “But that’s not Grandpa!”
“No, honey, it’s not Grandpa. That’s my dad. He died when I was very young.”
“Mom, why have you never told me? It is so, so sad … How did he die?”
“He took his own life. He died by suicide.”
As it turned out, it was so very simple to tell my son the story of my dad, his grandfather.
“Wow. You mean I have five grandparents?!”
I got to tell my son the things he has in common with my dad: Their eyes, their love for Granny Smith apples, their creativity, their love for building and being by the water. We got to talk about mental health and why it’s so important to me and to our family.
I then went through the same story with my daughter, who understood it so quickly, it was striking. A few days later, while looking at other family pictures, we were able to add in the context of timelines that hadn’t been able to be accessed before. We could talk about, as my daughter said, “When your ‘Old Dad’ passed,” just like it was any other part of my life, because it was and it is.
Now, it is so much more comfortable to talk about death in my house, which is oddly convenient given that death is surrounding us with the pandemic.
The thinker and scholar bell hooks states, “most children are amazing critical thinkers before we silence them,” and this sentiment rings entirely true to me at this moment. My children knew about death because death is a part of life, and they are experts at life. I am so glad that we broke the silence around my father’s death and that breaking that silence has opened up space for so much more exploration, discussion, and truth-telling.
Several years ago, I wrote about beginning to talk to my son about death and my anxieties and fears of talking with a small child about something that felt so big. I quoted psychologist Polly Dunn, who writes: “You’d rather have your children know that you are a person that they can talk to about tragedies, rather than a person who hides from them.”
Yes, that’s exactly what I want.
My colleagues and friends Arlen Grad Gaines and Meredith Englander Polsky wrote a great book for children called I Have a Question about Death: Clear Answers for All Kids, including Children with Autism Spectrum Disorder or other Special Needs. (They also wrote similar books on topics of cancer and divorce.) If you’d like to get more specific information about how to talk to kids about death and answer kids’ amazing questions, I’d recommend starting with their book. In addition, this resource on Children’s View of Death by Stages of Development may be helpful in thinking about what a child understands about death as their brains, hearts, and worlds are developing.
Copyright 2020, Elana Premack Sandler, all rights reserved.
