How to best prepare DD for the loss of her grandfather?

[GraceDarling]

DD is 3, and my FIL probably only has a few weeks to live. She has been visiting him in hospital for a few weeks now, so knows that he is ill, although we'd all thought that he was getting better. Does anyone have any advice as to how we could best handle this with her?

Thanks in advance for any help.

depends on your beliefs really. Does the hospital have any help for children dealing with loss. My sister was about 5 when our grandfather died. She was given some colouring sheets which helped explain it. Not sure how good that worked bu tmight be worth checking out.

Thanks LilQueenie. We're not religious, so guess we really need to be able to say something factual, but ideally positive too. Just really not sure what...

Sorry to hear about your fil.

My Mum died 3 months ago, and as she was dying (from cancer) the dd's, the youngest of whom is 3, were able to talk to her, and tbh, dd2, had no idea what was going on. She knew Gran was very poorly, but that was about it.

When Mum died, we just explained that the angels were now looking after her, and dd2 seemed happy with that.

It's up to you, but I would try not to over-explain it.

I'm sorry about your mum, Isthisok. Thanks for the advicek think not-over explaining sounds ike a good idea, but just a bit stumped as to what to say.

My grandfather died when my DS was 3: we really didn't talk about it as something that was going to happen (ie warn DS) because we didn't want him to worry about it, which I think he would have done - we just explained what was happening as it occurred. Eg he's not talking much / moving much because he's very, very unwell; mummy is sad because her grandpa has died. We answered every question DS had as honestly as possible.
We only explained about death after it had happened, and said that grandpa's body was very old and was not well and eventually had just stopped working completely and that this meant we would never see him again - which made us all feel very sad. We told him (because he asked) that death happens to absolutely everyone but that it was impossible to tell him when I or he, or his father or [list of about a million acquaintances] would die because that's the one thing none of us really knows. This discussion went on for several weeks until he'd got the ideas straight in his head.
We explained the funeral (which he didn't go to, as it was abroad) as a kind of celebration which started off with everyone being sad to have lost someone so lovely and so loved, but then progressed into a kind of happy celebration of his life and all the things we'd loved about him. My DH and I have no religious faith so didn't say anything about angels or afterlife - we said that death was final, but that as long as there were still people alive who had known grandpa then there would be loving memories of him around in the world. DS seemed to be comfortable with this.
He did talk about death a lot for a long time, which at the time alarmed me, but I think was just his way of consolidating the info.
I think the biggest thing was just being available to talk whenever he had a question, letting him lead the conversations, being honest about stuff including being sad, and also talking lots about the things we had loved about grandpa.
Apologies for being a bit verbose. I do hope the next few weeks and months go as well as they can for you and your family - it must be a horrible time for you all. Take care.

Go to your library and look for children's story books specialising in the subject of death (at my library they were in the "Health & Medicine" section). When my mum died of cancer last year, I found some great story books for my DD's age group (she was 5 at the time) which covered why sometimes we lose our loved ones and how it's okay to be sad, etc. My DD was only aware that "Nanny was very poorly" prior to her passing away, to explain my long absences from home to go and care for her, so the books were invaluable to help explain why what happened happened.

HTH x

Thank you to all, all very useful, especially the detail from Rooble of a non-religious approach.

Another one like cat64 here. In our case it was a neighbour we were very close to rather than a GP. We carried on visiting her whilst she was at home and kept things normal, she died within a couple of days of going into hospital so we didn't discuss that side of things and instead told DS once she'd died although this is obviously slightly different for you.

DS at first said she should go back to hospital and they could make her better which was hard to handle as he has to go to hospital regularly so we needed to keep hospital as a 'good place' whilst getting him to understand that our neighbour wouldn't be getting better. We just explained that our neighbour had something very unusual that made her poorly that mummies, daddies and children didn't get. As far as possible we tried to make her death 'exceptional' as we didn't want him worrying about other old people, us, himself etc. I think at age 3 that's a reasonable thing to do. We also avoided things like 'gone to sleep' etc as we'd been told that can lead to bedtime problems.

We had a few weeks of occasional comments and there was clearly a lot of 'working it out' going on in DS's mind. We had tales of 'teddy's daddy getting poorly and dying' etc which he was very matter of fact about and we figure was his way of coming to terms with it. This seemed to help quite a lot, we didn't push the role play but where it was happening we went along with it, asked questions and talked about it etc.

Thinking of you all.

Thanks Acekicker; will definitely avoid all the "gone to sleep" analogies

Winstons Wish have a whole pile of resources for use in situations like this.

www.winstonswish.org.uk/

thanks Lurker, a very useful resource.

Had this conversation with DH a few days ago, as to how we would explain that my dad died, so why DS doesn't have a grandad from my side.

This came about as my sister told her dc that he had gone far far away (which I didn't like as an explanation, seems so open)

We decided to explain that he had died and is now a star in the sky. Were not religious but liked the idea that he was looking over DS.

Thoughts are with you at this very hard time x

Looks like a splendid book, shineoncrazydiamond; ordered! And thanks for your thoughts houmousandcarrotsandwich; much appreciated.

sorry, namechanger, I am also GraceDarling!

I welled up just reading the Guardian review of that one, Shine. Would it be suitable for a 3 year old, do you think? Sounded fabulous, but the idea of death as a stalker sounded a bit scary for the very young?