How do you handle mortality questions

[slipperandpjsmum]

Today my dd said she had been thinking about all the people who have died and that one day she will and thinking that she didn't exist had made her feel very frightened.

Has anyone else had conversations around this topic? How did you handle it?

I haven't had this sort of conversation with my children for a long time, so I just asked them.

ds (12) said "generally it's a good idea to not think about it"

dd (11) said that she had recently been talking about daeth with her best friend and apparently she is going to be a ghost when she dies and hang around her friends until they die too. Her best buddy said she would be going to heaven, but dd said that she thought she wasn't really good enough for that (she also doesn't actually believe in god which I imagine might be a bit of a barrier). It sounded like a very relaxed conversation.

I guess how you handle this sort of conversation depends on your child. Some want reassurance, some need to be laughed out of it and for others a more practical approach works best. When ds got himself into a tizzy about natural disasters we told him about the low probability of each sort of event where we lived, and just worked through his worries with him. Took a while but he did become much less anxious and then he forgot all about it. I guess I'd probably take a similar approach, going for the logical approach.

I'm assuming you're not religious? I usually take the tack that I believe that we'll all meet up again after we die, in an upbeat kind of way, and that the deceased we love are watching over us.

But if you're not keen on that approach, the other thing I say is that we leave a mark behind us after we're gone. It can be things we've created or done, but not necessarily massive things, like the Mona Lisa or causing WWII - but the little kindnesses in every day, and the memories we leave behind, let us carry on living in people's thoughts.

I suppose it's also a chance to say that we don't know how long we have on this earth to enjoy life, so to make the most of each day.