Children and Death: What do they learn and what should they (not?) learn?

Obviously my personal experience is going to colour the way in which I believe children learn about death -- what it is, how it works, what it means, how to respond to it, and how to deal with it. Because my own experience influences how I think about these things, I'll begin by discussing my childhood connection(s) with death.

The most intimate experience I have with death -- but, paradoxically, also the least intimate -- is that of my father. He died in a skiing accident when I was six months old, an age where I could not notice or comprehend, let alone appreciate, the notion of death (of my father or anyone else). I grew up knowing that my father had died, that the family had experienced a loss and that they grieved. I, however, did not experience a loss nor did I grieve. I went through childhood going to visit my father's grave with my granny, taking flowers and cards to a person I never knew. Since growing up, I've realized that this was incredibly strange. I feel nowadays that I did these things because people expected it of me, that it was the right thing to do when someone had died, but it was never for me and it never felt right for me to be doing it. I was investing time in falsely "grieving" a person I never knew, I person I did not and could not miss. I couldn't say these things as a child because I had not yet realized that I felt them (although I did feel somewhat awkward and strange whenever I went to the cemetery -- a feeling whose source I was fully unaware of at the time -- where my granny would also take me to the grave of a family friend, a grave I felt more comfortable visiting than that of my own father because I had met this family friend at least twice...). As an older child/young adolescent -- let's say about 11/12 or so -- I started to realize why I had these strange feelings whenever I went to the cemetery, and it started to feel inappropriate of me to be going to this person's grave and leaving him flowers. I realized that cemeteries and graves were supposed to be places of memory -- something that had been taught to me unconsciously by observing my granny and my aunt grieve over my father and put time into selecting flowers, going to the cemetery, maintaining the grave, etc. However, there was nothing that the cemetery represented for me in terms of memory because I was supposed to be remembering a person it was impossible for me to remember. I was supposed to be remembering and getting over a loss I'd never experienced, grieving a person I'd never known. I stopped going to the cemetery around this age.

One of the more uncomfortable kinds of places I encountered during childhood. It's not that I was uncomfortable with death, rather that I had no reason and felt I had no right to be here (photo courtesy of http://www.vdfhs.com/cemeteries/north_okanagan/vernon/vernon_municipal_pleasant_valley/images/inside.jpg)

Throughout the years in which I did go to the cemetery, I'd only ever gone with my granny. I was taught the usual "cemeteries are places of remembrance and respect" and these usual practices we have regarding death, loss, and memory by my granny. It was taught to my by my granny that it's okay to talk about death sometimes (not that I ever did -- what would I have said?). This, however, was only one way I learned about death. My mother had (and has) a completely different approach to my father's death than my granny did. My mom takes the "I'm not going to talk about this or show feelings towards it" approach. My mom rarely talked about my father when I was a kid, and she still rarely does so (she does it more now). I understand this -- my mom doesn't like to cry in front of people and talking about her memories of my father's life and death would have caused her to be more emotional in front of my brother and I than she would have liked. The one exception to this was, and still is, the anniversary of my father's death. This is the one day a year that my mother openly grieves still.

 I also don't think I've known my mom, in the entire time since my father died, to have visited his grave. This confused me a lot as a child, especially since I was made to go to the grave of a person to which I had no real connection other than a biological one. For years and years I could not figure out why my mom never visited her husband's grave when people like my granny and my aunt did. When I got to that weird age when I started realizing why I felt awkward going to the cemetery, I finally asked my mom why she didn't go. Her answer was simple: "Because I don't believe your dad is there." This was the first time I had ever encountered the notion of the cemetery not being the main place of interacting with the souls of the dead.

The fact that I was taught two very different versions of how to deal with death -- my granny's approach of active commemoration and my mother's approach of private remembrance -- and the fact that I was forced into recognizing a death that I had not personally felt combined to give me a fairly confused outlook on death, grief, and remembrance. I've had to figure out a lot of things relating to these on my own over the last few years. I came to fully realize that it was odd and somewhat wrong of me to pretend to grieve for someone that it was impossible for me to do this for. I now feel like that was an infringement on the real right to grief and commemoration that the rest of my family has. I've realized that I only acted in that manner as a child because people taught me to do that, people expected it of me so that's how I was supposed to behave. I've also realized that my family's pressure on me to feel that loss was probably not the best approach in teaching me about death. It has fostered in me some strange thoughts on death and has reduced my sentimentality because I now have a mental connection between grief practices and false intent behind them. I can intellectually comprehend the fact that there is real intent behind grief practices and that they are usually motivated by a legitimate sense of loss. All my activities surrounding death, however, have not been motivated by this. They have been motivated by a childhood desire to do what people expect of me, to behave like a good little kid. I have a newfound cynicism regarding these topics now, and it leads me to think things like going to the cemetery and buying flowers for the dead, big expensive funerals, and burial with things in the coffin and a headstone can be somewhat useless and, sometimes, too mushy.

These ideas are also coloured by the fact that no one I've ever been close to has died yet. I haven't had the real feeling of deep loss in my entire almost 20 years. I'm sure when this does happen, my cynicism about death and funerary/remembrance practices will fade, but for now my concrete views on death, a weird mixture of my mom's distant approach to death and my own weird feelings on my childhood visits to the cemetery, are as follows: do something useful with the body (science, coral reef, etc.), and have a funeral as a form of closure but don't spend extravagant amounts of money. Basically, since the messages I received about exactly how to grieve were so jumbled,  grief is something that I think people should practice however they feel is right for them. Having a mode of loss forced upon me as a child and realizing that grief is one of the most personal things people can experience had led me to believe that individualized grief practices are the way to go. People should demonstrate their mode of grief to their children, but they should also think about how their kids go through these experiences because kids experience things differently than adults. Parents, I think, should make sure their kids know that there is more than one way to grieve and more than one way to handle and view death. Kids should know about different ways of doing this so that they can figure out whatever works best for them with as little confusion as possible.

photo courtesy of  www.all-about-psychology.com/ grief-and-loss.htm

This gets to my thoughts on the "100 Fact About Mummies" books for kids and Ericka's question of whether or not kids should be seeing these kinds of images and reading about things such as human sacrifice in ancient cultures. My answer to this is: why the heck not? This kind of book can help to show kids that there are ways to deal with death other than what they're used to, and also show them that other people do things differently than we do in general, leading to (hopefully) and early acceptance of other, very different cultures (and possible cultivate some future anthropology students?). I find that death can be kept at a great distance from children in our society unless people they are very close to die. This can make the death of others an extremely traumatizing experience (which, yes, death should be affective, but should it cause as much emotional turmoil as it tends to for us). I think teaching children about death and the different ways of dealing with it can make them better equipped to do so and could give them a richer understanding of what death means to them as well as others. My view that children should be taught that there are different ways of dealing with death may seem odd given the fact that I've expressed some frustration with how my exposure to two different styles of dealing with death caused me some confusion. However, I feel like I was never actually taught that these other methods (other than my mom's and my granny's) existed and I always felt like I wasn't supposed to make a synthesis between the ways I was taught. I rather felt like I was being pulled between the two approaches, not that it was okay to pick one, the other, a mixture of both, or something completely different. I think telling kids about various modes of grief while performing one yourself, explaining to them that your method is only one of many and that grief is too personal to be practiced because you think it's expected of you, and being openly discursive about death with kids (while still being sensitive to the fact that they're little kids...) is a good approach to teaching kids about death.

The idea that children shouldn't be exposed to the more graphic kinds of death and dealing with it, such as mummification, seems a little silly to me. While I don't necessarily approve of exposing kids to things such as violent video games and graphic movies, I think dealing with something as pervasive, personal, important, and influential as death and grieving requires us to be less squeamish. Our mode of teaching kids about death by telling them, for instance, that a person isn't "dead" but is just "gone now" or "passed away" -- a very euphemistic method -- teaches kids that death needs to be kept at an extreme distance and that open dialogue about death can't occur. I know I never really felt like I could talk about death as a kid, and if I did it had to be in such euphemistic and softened terms because using words like "dead" and "death" were seen by my older families members as too harsh and, I think, too realistic. This attempt at keeping death at as much of a distance as possible leads, I think, to death being more emotionally traumatizing and shocking because we refuse to deal with it.

photo courtesy of http://www.wesleyjsmith.com/blog/uploaded_images/euphemism_gif-743732-720565.png