I’m having a lot of trouble explaining the concept of death to my three year old.
First of all, he asked where my father was, and I said ‘dead’ without thinking. “Where’s dead mummy?” “Far away.”
Next, we were at the beach and saw some birds pecking open mussel a shells to eat the mussels. “Isn’t that sore for the mussels mummy?” “Er.”
He hasn’t experienced loss yet. He doesn’t understand when animals attack and bite each other (he loves dinosaurs and loves ‘dinosaur battles’) they are hurting and killing each other, and what that means.
I can tell he’s beginning to grasp the beginning of the idea and ask me questions leading to the subject. What do I tell him? We bond over reading and he has learnt a lot from books, so is there a good book which could explain the concept of death? Especially if it’s quite general, Eg not a whole book focussed on grandma dying as I just know he’ll latch on to the idea of his granny dying, get upset, and not take in anything else.