Death of BM

[estornudar]

DS is 5 and has been with us since 11 months. Was in foster care previously and never lived with BM. He knows his life story at an age-appropriate level.

We've just found out, completely by chance (on a funeral service's social media page), that his BM died in November. I'm pretty sure the adoption agency don't know as when I sent letterbox in February they said they'd encourage her to write back.

I guess I should inform the adoption agency? Obviously it raises questions around how she died, both in case it was genetic health-related and because DS is bound to ask at some point. The adoption agency are best to follow that up, right? I wonder if his sisters will want to keep up with letterbox?

Any advice on how to approach breaking the news with DS? We won't tell him straight away until we've got our heads around it all, but my gut says we need to not hang onto it and share it sooner rather than later in the grand scheme of things.

Any thoughts, experiences or advice would be gratefully received!

This is a hard one, does DS know about letter box and expect a response. Our little one came to us at 6 months and he’s too young to understand at moment but my initial thoughts I probably wouldn’t tell them until the time was right to have a serious and well understood conversation.

our little one knows they are adopted and has a shelf in the corner of their bedroom with their life story book, teddies birth parents gave them, but they pay zero attention of interest in any of it at the minute.

Does your child have any knowledge of death? That would be my starting point. At 5 death is quite an abstract concept and the idea of having a birth mum is also quite abstract and cognitively he’s too young to really get abstract. I’d be telling him about it when you’re ready, but not holding off too long.

Make it as concrete as you possibly can, used the word died (as opposed to passed away or gone to heaven because that layers abstract upon abstract). It then becomes knowledge that grows with him, so as he grows his understanding grows with him. Be prepared for questions about death, what it means and whether people around him might die etc.

Be prepared not to have much if any information about how she died. While it obviously feels relevant for all the reasons you mention, it is also private medical information which agencies may not share with you.

Contact your adoption agency as they can try to find out more. Even if you don't tell him just yet, you will hopefully then have more info to give him.

Thank you for the replies. He knows we write but they have never written back apart from the first one 4 years ago so he doesn't receive regular replies. He has his life story book and teddies from his BM and BSs in his room and isn't massively interested but can pick them out in photos and likes to look at things from when he was a baby.

We actually have a chicken on her deathbed at the moment, which will be his first proper experience of death. We'll definitely wait for that to pass first but like you say not hold off for too long. Good call on the language usage advice too, thank you. I spoke to the adoption agency this afternoon and they didn't know, but someone from the post-adoption support team is going to get in touch next week to talk about it and give us some more advice for talking to him about it.

It's just all so very sad!

You’ve had some great advice. We’ve had experience of a birth parent dying. I’d just add - to time it to best suit any support your son needs. We found out in the April and told them over the summer holidays, so they would be close to us. We also got their new teachers up to speed with the relevant information, so that they could support when the children returned in September.

Summer holidays is a good call. We're both teachers so will be with him the whole summer. Good call on giving the school a head up too, thank you!

My daughter's birth father died when she was a toddler. She was placed with us aged 5 and found this part of her story very difficult. So we worked our way through a grief workbook for young children called "Muddles, Puddles and Sunshine" and it helped her a lot. We hardly knew anything about her birth father, but wrote down the few things we did know and answered everything else with what she would have liked to have been. This helped her a lot to process his death. I would try to find out where birth mum's grave is to possibly visit at a later stage. We did that when my daughter was 8.

Our son's birth father died a while ago, but we did not find out for almost a year.

We found out all we could. We told him and he got a bit upset. He has been with us a long time (about a decade). It was hard but it does need to be said.

We offered ways to celebrate his father's life but in the long run he did not wish to do so.