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As the leaves collect in tatters red and gold
around the front porch, Eric, only 4 years old, sits on the
rocking chair without moving, too small yet for his feet to
reach the floor. “When’s Grandma coming home?” he asks. His
father, sweeping a clean floor to keep busy, wants to say
more, but only mumbles, “I don’t know.”
It is the last great taboo in our culture. We
talk about breast implants, Viagra, and politics at the
dinner table and no one blinks. We are a people obsessed
with safety and, as such, Death is still the silent and
dreaded specter—we speak about it only in whispers, tipping
our heads towards corners, avoiding eye contact, hiding our
ill and dying away from sight.
With the best of intentions, often in the
hopes of protecting our children, many of us avoid
discussing the death of a loved one. We want to shield them.
They’re only children, we say. Let them have good
childhoods, good memories. However young they may be,
children are just like us in that they, too, sense the loss
whether or not it’s discussed. Though small, they require
the same things we do to get closure: to talk, share, and
mourn.
The one thing we need to do, then, is the one
thing that makes us most fearful and uncomfortable: talk.
Avoidance is not protection. Avoidance, on
the contrary, can lead to heightened anxiety, feelings of
abandonment, and unresolved anger. Unanswered questions and
distraction techniques leave a larger vacuum in the child’s
mind, prompting his imagination to fill it, often with
fantasies far worse than the truth.
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