Fun concepts to explain.

[rivka]

Alex: peeling a stamp off my stamp book, which I carelessly left on my desk. I need an envelope.

Me: Hey! Stamps cost money, so you can't use them without permission. takes it back.

Alex: But I need a stamp. I need an envelope that we're not using, and some stamps.

Me: Why do you need them?

Alex: Because I need to send a letter to my great-grandmother.

Me: Who is your great-grandmother?

Alex: She died.

Me: Honey, you can't send a letter to someone who died.

Alex: Why not?

Me: Because when someone dies, we don't know where they are and no one can see them or be with them anymore. That's why it's so sad when someone dies.

Alex: Oh.

I feel like I bungled that one, inadvertently giving the impression that death is like being swept away to one of the CIA's secret prisons. It would help if she gave me advance warning that I was going to need to come up with a sensitive explanation of life's great mysteries.

Comments

[wcg.livejournal.com]

I think you handled that about as well as anyone could have in similar circumstances.

[going-not-gone.livejournal.com]

Yeah, I love the way they spring deep philosophical questions at you without warning. : )

I think you did fine. If she asks again, you might just say, they're in a place that the post office can't find.

My daughter, at around Alex's age, just thought my stamps were pretty stickers, and decided to decorate a sheet of paper with about $4.00 in postage!

[kip-w.livejournal.com]

Yeah, I've had some of these fun conversations with Sarah. I think I tagged the posts "sarah" and "death," but I'm not 100% sure. Your explanation, I think, is okay. It doesn't have to be the only explanation she ever gets, and there's nothing in it that you'll have to contradict later.

[ailbhe]

Sounds like you did well, but that was a hard one!

[tea-dragon.livejournal.com]

I wonder what she wanted to write in the letter? Wouldn't it be cool if we could send letters to people who had died? It would make a great book!

[rivka.livejournal.com]

It's funny you should say that, because ever since that conversation I've been mulling over the idea of writing a story called "Dead Letter Office."

[kip-w.livejournal.com]

I once decided that to write to the deceased, you put their name on the envelope, and burn it in the fireplace. (I hasten to add, I was thinking in fictional terms, or at least in non-reality terms.)

[mjlayman.livejournal.com]

That is the Chinese method.

[curiousangel.livejournal.com]

She actually has one surviving great-grandmother... well, at least physically surviving.

My paternal grandmother has Alzheimer's, and has been losing her mental faculties for quite a while now. She was able to come to our wedding nine years ago, although she was pretty confused about just where we were having the wedding and who these people were that she hadn't known for years and years. Still, she seemed to enjoy it, and it meant a lot to me for her to be there.

She's still in decent physical condition, given that she's 96 years old. She exercises on a regular basis, so I'm told, and she doesn't have major problems with her health. However, she no longer remembers who I am, and she even has periods when she forgets who her son (my father) is. She does her best to be polite when I call to speak with her (she's living with my uncle and aunt, her other son), but it's very clear that she doesn't have any idea who I am.

Needless to say, I don't call her very much any more.

I wish Alex would get a chance to know the wonderful lady that I knew as I grew up. I'd like for her to work with Alex on her times-tables like she did with me, and to tell her about what it was like to live on a farm in Arkansas in the first part of the 20th century. That's gone into the mists of time now, though.

I sure do miss my grandmother.

[kip-w.livejournal.com]

Even after Mom's memory was more or less useless, it was still possible to find out things if they were approached in an oblique fashion. Asking her an outright question was right out -- the one thing she knew was that she couldn't remember anything. A quick aside, as if confirming a detail, could sometime elicit forgotten memories.

She seemed happiest near the end -- well, not right at the end, when she was just asleep all the time, but some months before she died, she seemed good-natured and content, finally free of the resentful feelings that were about the last thing to leave her.

[johnpalmer.livejournal.com]

I think you probably handled it just fine. I can quite easily imagine her having been focused only on posting the letter, and once she realized she couldn't, she probably moved on to something else.

But if you prefer, we can imagine how she'll be on the lookout for black helicopters if/when she needs to attend a funeral. (If so, I could dispatch Billina to guard against the helicopters. Monty Python had it right...nobody expects a special-ops trained chicken.

Age-appropriate

[hazelchaz]

Actually, a pretty good explanation, all things considering.

It's just one of those things where there's an adult point of view that puts a different light on it. You've done well.*

*(I just couldn't bring myself to write "you done good," it wouldn't make it past my grammar filter...)

[bosssio.livejournal.com]

why is it the well thought out explanations are usually never remembered but the off the cuff, jeez that didn't come out the way I wanted it to, ones are the statements that somehow resonate/are quoted back to me for years?

Or at least that is how it feels.

[womzilla.livejournal.com]

Actually, you've probably given her valuable groundwork for understanding the CIA's secret prisons.