Talking to kids about dying

According to research, most children become aware of death between the ages of five and seven, with their understanding growing over time. Like many kids, my first experiences with death was with my goldfish and a grandparent. I was seven when my maternal grandfather died of cancer.

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I was raised in a Catholic faith, although I stopped going to church during my teens. Today, like many Millennials, I follow a mixture of spiritual ideologies. At the time, I believed in heaven, so I wasn’t worried about the afterlife. I was worried about the rest of us left behind.

Decades later, my mum and I would talk about her grief and how it consumed her. At the time, I don’t remember it being explained to me. This was 30 years ago, when parents were taught to shield their kids from sensitive subjects.

The result? I made up my own assumptions: sickness is bad, sickness is unsurvivable, sickness tears families apart. Do not get sick. From that moment on, I developed a deep fear of my body. As a child, this showed up as health anxiety; as a teenager, an eating disorder.

It didn’t help that life kept showing me evidence of our mortality. When I was 17, my dad was diagnosed with Hodgkin lymphoma. His cancer brought unexpected gifts, including healing the rift I had with my mother. However, it also broke my trust in time: aren’t parents meant to be there to watch their kids grow older?

After five years of gruelling treatment, my dad went into remission – the same year my fiance, Eoghan, was diagnosed with skin cancer, which quickly spread to his liver, lungs, pancreas and brain.

In the short term, his experience eased my fear of illness. At the age of 36, Eoghan had youth on his side. Initially, he faced chemo with enthusiasm, energy and positivity, but the results didn’t reflect his optimism.

A year after diagnosis, Eoghan died three weeks after our wedding day, and I became a widow at the age of 23. My dad had survived, but my fiance had died. It felt like nothing could be counted on.

To cope with my grief, I chose to seize the day. For the next nine years, I partied hard, ran marathons, jumped between relationships, and threw myself into work and any kind of distraction. For a while, I could outrun my fears – until I settled down and became a mother.

Fragility? You don’t know the meaning of the word until you hold a newborn. Responsibility? Try being the primary caregiver to a little human. And why did everyone keep telling me that “time goes so fast”? It felt like a red flag to my anxiety.

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By the time my third child was born during lockdown, I was having panic attacks and spending hours a day Googling symptoms of potential illnesses. I blamed myself for not “seeing the signs” that my first husband was sick, and I was determined not to let it happen again.

It all came to a head when my youngest daughter was eight months old. I went for a routine skin check and, petrified, broke down in the doctor’s surgery. It was clear – to me and my GP – that I couldn’t continue like this.

As my husband said, “You’re terrified of getting sick and missing their life, but your terror is making you miss it.”

Over the next 18 months, I dived into therapy. I also reconnected with a lot of spiritual practices, like meditation and breathwork, which I’d let lapse in the early days of motherhood. I signed up to a “sobriety” app where I could track how many days I’d gone without Googling health symptoms. (After a false start, I’m now at 713.)

However, the biggest turning point came when I started talking to my kids about death – or, should I say, they started talking to me. And I really started to listen.

If you’re a parent, you might have noticed that kids love chatting about dead stuff. From dead bugs to roadkill and the deceased parents of Disney characters, they call it out – even in the most inappropriate moments.

Currently, my kids’ favourite topics to discuss are Pokemon, ice-cream flavours and “what happens after your body dies?” Their attitudes to death are as diverse as their personalities.

When their great-grandmother in England died suddenly last year, my son, then six, called my dad to discuss it. “Do you know, one of our chickens also died this week?” he told him – the man who had just lost his mother. My dad burst out laughing. Later, he said it was just what he needed: light-hearted and wonderfully factual.

My oldest daughter was in kindergarten when she came home from school and showed me a story she had written, unprompted. The title was The Star in the Sky and the first line read, “Everybody dies … and that’s OK. You have a big life.”

Kids naturally practise a “neutral acceptance” of death – a concept that means you accept death as a natural part of life, neither rejecting it nor jumping up and down with excitement.

Fragility? You don’t know the meaning of the word until you hold a newborn.

Dr Kate Renshaw is the founder and director of Play and Filial Therapy. She says many parents struggle to know what to say to children about death and grief. “A great first step is to take a child-centred perspective,” she says. “This can be tricky as adults have a fully developed brain and body. It can prove harder than it sounds to take a child’s perspective.”

As adults, we think every conversation about death has to be heavy, but with kids it can be quite the opposite. I’ve chatted to my kids about death while they swing at the park.

“Having supported many children through the process of understanding grief and loss, I’m continually reminded by children of the power of refocusing on the moment,” says Renshaw. “Joining children in their play affords adults an opportunity to shift their focus back into the present, and the preciousness of shared moments.”

Rituals have helped my family to embrace beginnings, endings and everything in between. My four-year-old will often ask to “light a candle for Nanny” as we did the night their great-grandmother died.

Casey Beros is the creator of Next of Kin, a publication and podcast that aims to change the conversation about care. When her dad was dying of cancer, she hired a death doula to ease his transition. It was important for her daughters, then three and six, to be part of the experience. “When Dad died, my kids were in the lounge room watching a Disney movie and blissfully unaware of the profound shift taking place in the bedroom,” she recalls. “After Dad had taken his last breath, my husband brought them in and my eldest went straight in for a cuddle with Dad’s body.”

Her youngest daughter hung back and whispered in her mum’s ear, “You said he was going to the angels, but he’s still right there.” To explain the difference between soul and body, they opened the window so his soul could leave the bedroom.

Eighteen months later, their grief is “blisteringly real,” says Beros, but her children’s approach to death is healing the whole family. “There’s something very pure and no-nonsense about how they’ve filed that experience away in themselves,” she adds. “I once heard someone say that a grandparent’s job is to teach their grandchildren about death, and I think that’s probably true – they’ll be better people for having had that experience.”

Wise Child (Hay House) by Amy Molloy is out now. Follow Amy on @amy_molloy.

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