Emo preschooler is emo.

[rivka]

Alex is talking about death a lot these days.

I posted a few weeks ago about having to explain to her why we can't send a letter to someone who has died. Since then, she's continued to raise the topic several times a week. I'm not sure why.

I think the topic initially came up because she was asking lots of questions about relatives. She likes working out the details of relationships: Grandma is her grandmother, and she's my mother. That led, inevitably, to questions like, "Who is your grandmother, Mama?" And I would answer something like: "I had two grandmothers - Grandma's mother, and Grandpa's mother. Their mothers were my grandmothers. But I don't have any grandmothers anymore because they died."

Once she absorbed the idea that she had a grandmother who died - Michael's mother, who died in 1997 and who we call "Grandma Nancy" when we talk to Alex - she kept returning and returning to the topic. "Grandma Nancy died," she'll inform me at random times. Sometimes she'll add, "Papa was so sad. He cried and cried." (I think that was initially something I told her.) And once: "I'm so sad that Grandma Nancy died, because I want to play with her."

She's constructed a logical story about Michael's family relationships: "Grandma Nancy was Papa's mother, but she died. And then Gran was Papa's new mother." I can see where she got there, and in the chronology of Michael's experience she's not entirely wrong. Gran is Laura, Michael's birthmother; Grandma Nancy was his adoptive mother. We didn't meet Laura until after Michael's mother died. (We haven't tried to explain adoption yet.)

Death talk is not limited to Grandma Nancy. She held up one of her Little Einstein dolls and informed me sadly, "Annie's mother died and her father died. She doesn't have any parents." The other day she said casually, "When my doctor dies, I'll get a new doctor."

Death, death, death.

"A child's mother and father usually don't die," I told her once.

"But Grandma Nancy died." She didn't sound especially distressed, just thoughtful.

"She died when Papa was a grownup. She stayed alive and took care of him the whole time he was a child."

"Oh."

I want to promise her that we won't die, but I haven't. I can't. Fortunately, she hasn't asked. She doesn't seem to worry about that, and she doesn't seem to worry about dying herself. She mostly seems to be trying to figure out death-the-concept: what the heck is up with death?

acceberskoorb - and let me say right here that all children should have an acceberskoorb in their lives - helped us find some books to read to Alex. There are quite a few picture books about death out there, but most of them fall into the category of "books to buy when someone significant in your preschooler's life has just died." Very few people seem to write "indulge your preschooler's philosophical curiosity about death" books. We wound up with two.

We've already gotten the first one from the library: When Dinosaurs Die, a comic book-format guide to basic questions about death. ("What does alive mean? Why does someone die? What does dead mean?") The text is general; the focus in the pictures and speech bubbles shifts back and forth from a dead bird some children find in the park to beloved pets to unconnected people (a soldier, an accident victim) to close relatives. I skip over a lot of the intense details about grieving when I read it to her. She loves it.

During tonight's reading - and OMG I am going straight to Parent Hell for reading a book about death and dying as a bedtime story, but she specifically requested it even after I suggested it was Not Quite The Thing - she came out with a couple of new comments: "Goodbye, Grandma Nancy" (said in a sad voice), and "I want to light a candle for Grandma Nancy." So she's obviously taking in quite a bit from the book, and reorganizing the way she thinks about having a dead relative.

The other book I ordered is called Lifetimes. From the Amazon reviews, it seems to focus on death as a natural process, a shared characteristic of all living things. That seems like it might be even more to the point, if her interest really is mostly philosophical.

It's hard to figure out where the line is between meeting your child's sincerely expressed interest in information about death and encouraging her to be weirdly, precociously morbid. I don't think a preoccupation with death is particularly normal for a three-year-old. And yet, if she's thinking about it and asking about it, obviously we can't cut her off completely. I'm hoping that these books will help settle her mind on the issue, and we can go back to her plans to become a veterinarian by age ten. ("Ten is old," she has informed us.)

Comments

[rivka.livejournal.com]

I thought about that too - I don't know. When we told her about the miscarriage, we never talked about it as a death. We said that we thought I had a baby growing inside me, but I didn't - I was just sick. And that we were sad because we wished there was a baby growing in me. But she might have overheard something that made her think differently, or she may have drawn her own conclusions.

(One heart-wrenching conclusion she drew was that, when I stopped being sick, there would be a baby growing in me. I wish.)