Kevin Baldeosingh
"Papa died," my daughter Jinaki told someone at her grandfather's wake last Saturday. My father had passed away the morning before, just six days short of his 87th birthday.
Not yet three years old, Jinaki has no understanding of death's permanence. Additionally, her Papa was not a key person in her young life: he had been bedridden for more than two years and his short-term memory had vanished, making conversation even with adults limited. On the other hand, Jinaki had always chatted with him, even though he was mostly lying down in the bedroom or sitting in his wheelchair in the dining room. And, despite his shadow mind, he always responded to her as if he knew she was his granddaughter.
The wake lasted four days, since due to traffic issues he couldn't be cremated until Carnival was over. But, in all that time and even at the funeral, Jinaki asked no questions about Papa or even expressed any awareness that he was gone. Child psychologists say that small children aged three to five years consider death to be reversible, like sleep. By age six or so, they understand that it's something that happens, but don't consider it relevant. By the time they're ten years old, most children start to understand that death will happen to everyone, including themselves.
Jinaki's understanding of death comes mostly from stories and dead insects. When I tell her Little Red Riding Hood, I don't sanitise the end like some of the new versions, in which the wolf is chastised by the woodcutter: my woodcutter chops off the wolf's head with his sharp gleaming axe and the wolf falls down dead. Similarly with a story she helped me craft, called The Greedy Monster and the Pasta and Fish, I sometimes conclude with the monster having a stomach ache but Jinaki often prefers to end with the monster dying.
My sister's daughter Kaelyn, when she was five or six years old, had a similar penchant for ghoulish stories, sometimes even asking her mother to pretend that she (Kaelyn) was dead, which my sister refused to do. But treating death matter-of-factly when children are too small to understand it may provide a grounding for dealing with grief later, if only because they already have a terminology for it.
As parents, we are the ones who have to help our children deal with death and grief, especially since their main worry is going to be our deaths. In our society, the reflex is to offer consolations based on our religious beliefs, but grief counsellors from developed societies don't generally recommend this approach for children. That is because telling children that the dead person is in "a happier place" can cause the child to feel abandoned and that their sadness is somehow wrong. Competent counsellors instead recommend the following general approach:
�2 Be honest–let the child know it's okay to be sad.
�2 Share your own grief–pretending to be strong doesn't help you or the child.
�2 Listen to what child wants to say, but don't pressure him or her to express grief.
�2 Reassure them that they're safe and loved.
�2 Don't avoid speaking about the dead person.
When the child asks questions about when someone is going to die, especially themselves, tell them that death usually only happens after a very long time–when they understand that death is far in the future, they come to terms with that reality.