Trying to explain death to my DS (nearly 6)

[mckenzie]

Ds seems to have recently been asking lots of questions about death
"where do we go when we die?"
"Why do we die?" etc. He has three elderely great grandparents so it is quite likely that he will experience the death of a loved one while still very young and so I'd like to get my explanation right.
I'm unsure myself what happens to us after death (and to be honest it scares me to think about it) but I lean towards believing that we go to heaven and have good behaiviour passes or something to come back down here and spiritually visit our loved ones when they need us (I've definitely felt my late father being with me on 2 separate occasions).

Are there any books that might help perhaps help with my DS?

I don't know of any books but i went with the 'we become stars in heaven who look down on us in the sky'. Thankfully i only have had to cover the death of pets though. I tried the going to live in heaven with jesus, but my dd1 said"i hate jesus, he is very selfish taking everything to go live with him!!!"

Stars seemed to work better!

thanks for your post mumoftwoangels.

We went through this quite recently when we lost my Gran - dcs wanted to know what had happened to her.

Personally I beleive she went to heaven (in line with her and my CHristian beleifs) and so that is what I told my children.

Dd1 (7) went through it a few times - no you cant get to heaven, even in a spaceship, no, you dont go there when you are dreaming, no, you cant just go to visit, no (cos thats what we believe) you cant ome back from heaven, not ever, but one day we will go there too and we will see her again. Won't she be lonely? No, because Jesus is there and all the friends and family she had who have already died and gobe there already.

Ds(5) didnt get the permanence, dd2 (3) didnt really understand.

i think it helps if you know what you are going to say ahead of time, so that you dont get too tied up in knots. We got the hard questions from d1, as far as we are concerned 'who gets to go to heaven?', 'what happens to you if you dont go to heaven?' etc which we had to work out ahead of time, and we were glad we did. BTW we didnt scare her with visions of hell, we're not that way inclined!

Our kids were happy enough with 'no-one really knows what happens cos noone has ever come back, but because we love Jesus we think ....'

Cant think of any books - we used our kiddie bible for descriptions of heaven.

Hope your grandparent s live for a while yet - but I think all kids go through a morbid death phase!

thanks for your post harrisey.

Ds asked me tonight how old my dad was when he died (only 34) but he didn't get upset by the answer (I thought he might as he understands number order and so knows that 34 isn't old) and proceeded to tell me that he thinks I will die at 53, he will die at 207, DH will die at 64 etc.

Tonight's other question was

"where is heaven?"

to which DD piped up

"mummy can't see it - she hasn't got her glasses on"