The Wind Phone | Loss
Kids Want to Know About Life, Death, and Everything in Between
Why not tell them?
A few weeks ago, my brother-in-law Barry invited my husband and me to join him for his mother’s memorial. He would inter her ashes in his garden, and we had strict instructions to arrive no later than 11.15 am.
Barry’s younger daughter, Amy, and her three children, aged six and a half, eight, and nine, were due to arrive at 12.30 pm. She had also given strict instructions that we must not discuss the morning’s proceedings when they arrived. The children must not know their ninety-eight-year-old great-grandmother, Granny Theresa, had passed away.
They were not to embrace the reality of what it means to be human.
My husband and I arrived fifteen minutes late, and by that time, the event was turning into a sitcom.
Barry, in typical fashion, had failed to pre-dig the hole for both Granny Theresa’s ashes and the enormous pink Camellia tree he intended to place on top of the ashes.
Barry’s sister, Linda, met us frantically looking for a shovel, muttering expletives under her breath and cursing her brother’s typical lack of organisation.
