“Mommy! Mommy! Can you put your lipstip (AKA lipstick) on me ?!”

I had put tinted lip gloss on Strawbaby once while she was watching me get ready to go out in what I thought was a cute mother/daughter moment and have been regretting it ever since. Besides the fact that she certainly didn’t need to be wearing make-up, at this moment I was trying to finish up a few emails before starting dinner and needed just five more minutes.

“When I’m done with my work, ok? Why don’t you draw a picture?” I pulled the glass jar on my desk filled with colored pens closer to her and found a piece of scrap paper.

Two minutes later…

“Mommy, look at my picture!” I glanced down at Strawbaby’s creation.  

“It’s beautiful, I love it, very colorful.” I said, turning back to my laptop.

“It’s for baby Adelaide! Can I give it to her?”

Adelaide’s pictures adorn our walls and shelves, she is as much a part of our home as someone can be that has never lived in it. Strawbaby didn’t get to meet Adelaide, but she knows her all the same. She knows she’s her sister. She knows that we love her. She talks about her and seems to have decided that she is eternally a baby, which in some ways I suppose is true.

“Why don’t you put it in this box for her? It’s where I keep some of my special memories and things that remind me of her.” If I can just finish this email…

“No! I want to GIVE it to her.” Like many four-year-olds, Strawbaby gets frustrated easily and I could see the familiar stubborn tempest begin to swirl in her eyes.

It wasn’t that I was avoiding the conversation about Adelaide, it just had never come up. Strawbaby had never asked where Adelaide was or why she didn’t live with us. To be fair, she has birth sisters that, while we keep in touch with them, don’t live with us either.

“I’m sorry sweetie, Adelaide died a few years ago but I know she would love your drawing.”

“Oh… was she hurt?”

“Sort of, her brain was super duper sick. But you don’t have to worry about that happening to you or me or Daddy – “

“Or Jackson or Tabasco or Sriracha?” Strawbaby interrupted. Naming family and friends is one of her top ten favorite activities.

“Exactly.”

Over the course of Strawbaby’s life we will need to have several difficult conversations as we explain her history and ours. We will take them as they come and try to keep them age appropriate. What I quickly recalled in that moment was what I had learned from the hospice social worker about the best way to explain Adelaide’s impending death to Jackson. She had instructed me on the importance of using the right words: specifically, dead and died. That saying moved on, passed away, up in the sky, or basically anything other than dead/died can cause confusion and fear. Of course at four, Strawbaby does not understand what dead means and without any other context probably won’t for several years. And that’s ok. What’s important is opening the conversation honestly and in a way that allows her to still feel safe.

For anyone looking for resources on explaining death to children, the Children’s Hospital of Philadelphia has a great page with conversation guides broken down by age of what you can expect a child to understand, process and how they might react. Sort of like the often dreaded “birds and the bees” talk, these are not one-off conversations that we get to have and be done with. They need to happen every few years as our children understand more and develop additional questions.

We so often try and keep our children protected from some of the harsher realities of the world. I get it, I certainly do too. And the fact that people die, that children can die, often falls into that harsh reality category, but I don’t think it has to. Death is as much a part of life as birth – it is quite literally unavoidable. Yes, death can be tragic – be it a child or person in the prime of their life. It can also be a celebratory conclusion to a beautiful life. But those are our emotional reactions to death. The grief and longing we attach to it as adults. For children it is much simpler and matter-of-fact.

Most likely because they don’t have the capacity to understand the finality of it, but I also wonder if it has something to do with young children being so new to life that not-existing is not as foreign of a concept to them. Regardless, I suppose my point is that we don’t need to fear exposing our children to death and grief. That doesn’t mean it will be easy it just means that if handled appropriately there is no reason that being aware of death should result in trauma. Also, kids can process and compartmentalize a lot more than we give them credit for.

“Honey, if you ever have questions about Adelaide you let me know, ok?”

“Ok, Mommy.” Strawbaby turned back to her drawing before pausing once again. “Can I have lipstip nooow?”