How & when to braoch the subject of death with a child?

[gigglepin]

As you all know my mil is dying.

ds is close to her, and knows something is wrong. He is 8.

She probably has weeks possibly months to live.

What do is ay to my little boy?

Firstly I am sorry to hear of this sad news :( It's tough with children. I had to tell DS1 who is 4yo that his great-grandmother had died in hospital (multi-organ failure, she was 90 years old). I worded it in simple terms. My grandmother loved cakes, it's one thing we all remember her for, her love of cakes. And so I felt the best way to describe what had happened was to say that great-granny has gone to Heaven and is eating cakes and having tea with the angels. I described that she is safe in Heaven and that she can no longer stay with us on Earth. He accepted it fairly well but even after 6 months, he will still occasionally say 'I miss great granny' out of the blue. I said it's okay to feel sad, and that we all have our time.

Good luck with whatever approach you take. I felt it was not appropriate to go into details of the way my grandmother died, that can wait until he's old enough to understand. The main thing is that they are able to grasp that we are not here for eternity, we all have our time to leave.

My DD is only 2, and when my Dad died this week I just explained to her in as simple, fact based terms as possible. She saw his wheelchair in the car and was concerned about it, so I just told her Grandpa didn't need his wheelchair in heaven as he could walk there, she bows say that 'Grandpa walk nicely in heaven' (her words not mine!) I did need to explain to her after a while that you don't come back from,heaven