Letting Children Be Who They Are

This morning, after struggling with increasingly ill health for some time, our dog Samantha passed away. My son Sebastian who’s 3 and a half, has been aware that Sam has not been well and more recently we began talking to him about the fact that sooner or later she would die and no longer be with us.

Recently he had being doing things to take the illness away, which mostly consisted of crawling under her, coming out the other side and throwing away the illness once he got to the other side. Sam has been there his whole life, they had their own personal relationship and she was an integral part of our family.

I’m not sure quite what ‘dying’ or ‘dead’ mean to him and I wanted us to be prepared for questions that I imagined coming, about where she’s gone and why. I also imagined, some form of grief for him and hoped my wife and I in our own grief would handle it well. I was concerned that we have something consistent and clear to give him as answers, this being his first experience of death in a personal way.

So far there have been no questions and no overt or even subtle signs of grief. He has actually been very matter of fact about it. When we told him Sam had died this morning, he said ‘yes you told me she would’, and this morning before he went to school we had told him that she probably would die. This morning as my wife and I were in the first waves of grief, he brought us cups of milk to help us feel better

I had a memory during the day of myself as a young child coming home from school to find the rabbit hutch empty and told Penny had died. I was very upset, but my parents hadn’t spoken to me about her being ill or dying so it was a bolt out of the blue for which i had no preparation.

In other big changes in Sebastians life, we have begun talking to him about them months in advance, and when we have by the time the change comes it has passed easily and smoothly.

Today was another lesson for me to let him be who he is, the rewards are obvious already.

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