How would an atheist explain death to a small child?

[puffling]

I'm just curious. It's a few years till dd will ask about that, but I don't want to be telling her about heaven and hell. Neither do I want to scare her by telling her the plain truth.

aloha, love your line about God should be in bed. Must work it in to my novel somewhere.

And Hallgerda, respect to you for 'Ilkley moor baht 'at atheist'.

I do the t'worms and the genes. So when dd cries because she never met Grandpa, I say no but she's met me, my two sisters and brother and each of us is half Grandpa, she herself is one quarter Grandpa, and we all resemble him.

And we tell her stories about him, pass on memories, look at pictures, enjoy his favourite songs etc.

Of course I was brought up on the Christian explanation. Now I look back and try to work out when I stopped believing it. Hard to tell, because I tried so hard to keep believing. But suspect it was early on - maybe before age five.

Kids are good bullshit detectors - think I was picking up that my parents didn't really believe it either.

So (in my opinion) we should tell them what we really do think, not what we'd like to think - because they can tell the difference

Peachy etc. - sorry you find it vomit inducing! I don't see anything wrong with telling a (very sensitive) 6 year old and four year old that that's their kitten (or whatever) in the stars looking down on them.

Time to find out the bleak truth later eh?

I like the idea of the 'passing on the genes' thing. But sadly for my dd1 her first experience of death was when her best friend died of menigitis aged 4 - they hadn't even started school. How to explain that? As it is, dd1 believes her friend is safe in God's hands, and she drew a picture to give to his non-believing mum.

I'm not an atheist but a believer in the possibilty of an afterlife - after all nobody knows for certain and there seems little point getting stressed about it. The stars idea is, IMO, quite lovely, and not entirely untrue.