Death and Dying, Grief and Loss

Watching and listening to the reaction of our Child Self will tell us a lot about how we were taught about death as children. The Child Self usually holds the clues to our fears about death. 

My 3-year-old grandnephew, Oscar, is the type of child who asks lots of questions like: “Why can’t men have babies?” . . . “Why don’t men have breasts to feed babies?” and so forth. So, when the family cat did not come home from the vet’s, his parents and I knew that questions were sure to follow. 

Here is what we talked about saying to him:

“We are sad that Max, our cat, has died. It means that we can’t hold him or see him or brush his fur. We have stories to tell about Max, like ‘Remember the time he did this or that. . .’ but there will be no new stories about him. We wonder if you are sad about Max?”

When Oscar asks questions about death, I told my niece to be truthful. Let him know that there are things we just don’t understand: 

“We don’t know when someone is going to die. We don’t know a lot of things about death, but we know we are okay because it is the way things are. It is okay that we don’t have all the answers, we are still safe without them. You are safe.”

It can be nice to make a memory book, write a story, or have a ceremony to honor the death of a loved one, with your Child, or with your Child Self, especially if you never had the chance to do that. 

When questions about whether “mom will die” arise, and they will, there are ways to talk about it. In reassuring the Child, we need to reinforce that it’s okay that we don’t know a lot about death and to point to the usually long lives of humans and the relatively short life span of a cat, dog, or fish. 

What can be harmful to a child is to avoid the topic. When we don’t acknowledge death, we negatively empower and compound the fear of it in ways that are unsafe for the Child and are probably hard for the Child Self. Our goals are to engender an acceptance of the inevitability of death and the reality that even though we do not know or control everything, we are still okay. 

One of my client’s sons was very disturbed when he learned that the salmon—which they could see leaping in the river near their home—were going to lay their eggs and die. So, the mom told him the truth, with a twist. “We know that the salmon will leap up the river to lay their eggs, and then they will die. Would the salmon only want us to think about them dying? They are living the way nature made them, they are strong, and they lay a lot of eggs so there will be a lot more salmon! We want to think about their lives as they are and not just about their deaths, which we can’t control or even completely understand.” 

Watching and listening to the reaction of our Child Self will tell us a lot about how we were taught about death as children. The Child Self usually holds the clues to our fears about death. In some cultures, people accept death and aging as a natural part of life. In our culture, people learn to fear death and are taught through cultural messaging that we can defy the aging process and outlive a normal lifespan or even prevent death. 

The fear of death may be the most powerful influencer and motivator in society, causing a great deal of damage. We are taught that we somehow can live forever through material gain. We know that throughout history this drive to material immortality has led to a disregard for others, disrespect for the land, and greed-driven ego behavior.

Teaching our children about death is an opportunity to remind our Child and our Child Selves that we are okay with uncertainty. We want to shift our focus from denying and fearing death to living our lives in the present and taking responsibility for how we live them. 

To the Child Self, it can be a comfort to reference the teachings of the Tao de Jing and say: 

“Little one, one moment it was there another it is gone. One moment we are here, and another we have gone. We are just waiting for the train in the waiting room on a station and while here we are creating such a fuss: fear, doubt, fighting, hurting, violence, ambition, struggle. And then the train comes and you are gone. What flower would you like to be while waiting, that is up to you” 

Grief is essential to living as whole human beings. When we experience it as adults, we may have to tend to the way our Child Self is reacting to grief. As children, we may not have received support for our grief; we may have been given a time limit for grieving along with messages about the right and wrong ways to grieve. I believe that grief does not go away; it has its own form of existence and reality, and it lives with us. The relationship is not static, it changes. Cutting off the pain of grief is cutting off a part of the self. 

To our Child and Child Selves we must say:

“Little one, I get it, you lost your grandmom, she is never coming back in the same way. That’s painful. I am here, you can lean into me for the support you need to be sad, because grief is hard, but it is also a gift. It gives us space for our feelings about something that has changed, that is not easy, but it is what we need to do.” 

Children need to grieve. When my mother died, our six-year-old son wrote a memory book about her. It was our idea, but the words were his. The hardest part for me was when he put on her necklace and said, “I am making magic for her to come back.” He kissed the pendant and moved around the room in all directions. That was hard for me because I wasn’t prepared for my mother’s death. Even my mother did not prepare me, as she could not talk about it. 

When I was a child, death was hidden from me. At 36 years old when my mother died, I could feel only the loss, compounded by the losses my Child Self had experienced growing up. I felt abandoned by her, as if she meant to leave me. I wanted to give my son the opportunity to grieve, but to understand that, as far as we knew, he could not bring back her body with his ceremony, and that he could keep her close by placing her in his mind for memories and his heart for love. He did, and I worked on this for myself. 

The Child’s and Child Self’s reactions to the death of a loved one hinges, in part, on the way adults talk to them about it. They are less likely to feel betrayed and resentful, or anxious, if adults tell them what is going on as it is happening and include them, in an age-appropriate way, in the process. The Child Self won’t have to feel abandoned or fearful, and the Child we are raising will hear our grief, but not our sense of abandonment or absorb our irrational fears. 

Telling the truth does not mean telling all of the truth. Tending to the Child Self and the Child means the Adult has to be protective and discern what to share. Children shouldn’t be included in adult processes that are not about them. 

As a 4-year-old, my dear friend suffered three consecutive deaths in her family, including that of a child. No one talked to her about it. We know that telling her about the pain someone had suffered or the details of a disease that caused the death of a child would not have been appropriate. However, adults in the family were sad around her, even depressed, and as a child she did not understand what was going on, she was frightened and insecure.  No one noticed that when her mom left the house after these deaths, and she would get hysterical; she feared unconsciously that her mom was not going to come back, like those that had died. 

If her parents could have said this to her, when the deaths happened, they might have been able to see her fears and not read them as temperamental behaviors: 

“Honey, Uncle Solomon is not coming back anymore. He was very old, and he died. This means his body is not with us anymore; it is so sad for us. I am sad, but sadness is how I know how strong my feelings were for him. When someone dies, we have the power to think about and remember them. Even when we can’t see them. I know you know that cousin Joe was a little boy and he died too. That is just extra sad for us; we wanted him to live to be an old man like Uncle Solomon. We do not get to choose that. That can make us extra sad, maybe even scared or angry, and a child dying is not what usually happens. What we do know is he was sick, a really big strong sickness, and you are not sick. That makes us all happy, and I am not sick.”

Perhaps my friend’s parents could have helped her by stepping back for a moment from their own pain and notice that she needed to be reassured: “I am going out to the store now, but I am coming back; unlike Uncle Solomon I will be back.” 

What if you are sick, or maybe dying? What if what you have to say to your child is almost too unbearable to believe or act on? I strongly urge you to talk about it, even the confusion of it all. Protect the child from the fear, your fears even, and from harshness, but tell the truth as best you can. Involve them in your life, which may include your illness or death. Don’t leave the Child you are raising without the permission to grieve or the path to grieve. Don’t leave your Child Self with the terror of feeling helpless, even when they, and we, don’t have control. 

At my last annual health exam my doctor asked me: “What are you afraid of?” My response was: “Not death. But dying scares me, illness, pain, leaving my beloveds.” This is not a horrible place to have arrived. I am, in many ways, welcoming death, just not now. I don’t want to worship death and therefore hasten it. But the finality that goes with living life as a human is like the sunset, there is a time to rest. Time to say, “I did what I could, and I think Creator is pleased, now I can rest.”

Today, I know that my own unresolved and fearful feelings about dying are connected to what I was not told as a child when someone I loved died and how I wasn’t supported. Even the death of a tree made me sad when I had to say goodbye to it. It is good to have an Adult—one who is tending to their Child Self—explain the unexplainable, share the grief, respect it, and show how they too are trying to accept the unknown with grace. 

©D'vorah Horn 2025. We invite you to share this work, but please do not copy any portion without attribution to D'vorah Horn.