Conversations about Death with a 3 year old

So follow up post to one I wrote earlier about my daughter E, as this kid continues to blow my mind with her resilience, intelligence, and capacity for adaptation.

For this post, I’d like to explore a question from others that comes up often: how do you talk to a three-year-old about death?

I was very fortunate to have made contact with an expert on child development early on and her advice was, be honest and be consistent when discussing Chelsea’s passing. Little kids are incredibly perceptive, and they know something’s changed. No point in lying to them about it, because then they’ll know you’re trying to hide something. Truth be told, this advice isn’t that different from what one should normally do as a parent.

So that’s what I did: the day it happened, I told E that her mother had died. Not surprisingly, this conversation was one of the harder things I’ve ever had to do.

Now, the tricky part is finding the right words to explain what death means, and the message definitely changed over time. My first message (before I had a chance to talk with an expert) involved something about Chelsea going to live with the stars in the sky. It sounded nice in my head, but I under-estimated my daughter’s intelligence; she very quickly started looking up at objects in the sky, like helicopters, and asking whether mom was riding in one of them. She would then start crying and say ‘I want momma to come down.’ (Those comments ripped my heart out on an almost daily basis that first week).

After I got the advice about being completely honest, the message shifted to something like : ‘Mom’s heart stopped working, so she died. And when she died, she went to a different place where we can’t see her anymore.’ We’ve also talked at length about how mom didn’t have a choice about what happened; she didn’t want to leave, she didn’t know she was going to die, and she had no control over dying.

For now, that’s the best I’ve got, but the language limits are agonizing. The words I use lend themselves to descriptions of a location, and of travel: when you die, you go to a different place. I did enjoy E’s questioning about the travel process: she asked how you get to that place when you die, to which I asked her what she thought. Her response: maybe you take a submarine.

I do love the visual of Chelsea traveling to the beyond in a yellow submarine.

But again, the language limits are tough. Best guess, E still thinks her mom is physically in another place, and I can’t really address this issue without talking about the process of cremation (we’re not going there for a while). So this will be a conversation that we revisit over time, gradually adding more detail and description.

Eventually, we’ll hit another language boundary. E has, rather quickly, hit on some of the more fundamental questions with which we grapple, questions about mortality and death. While I know what happened to Chelsea’s body, I have no idea what happened to her essence (whatever that is), and E may well be right that Chelsea’s essence is somewhere else in the Cosmos. I’m religiously agnostic (more on that later), so I lack the belief systems to make sense out these questions. I would also argue that, even in religious belief systems, there are still serious language limitations with respect to talking about death (most explanations still involve place, and travel).

Perhaps hitting these sort of language boundaries isn’t a bad thing, as it introduces E to the fact that there are unknowable questions out there, which sets up a Pre-K conversation about epistemology. As the child development person told me, be honest, and sometimes being honest means admitting you don’t know.