Over dinner last night was the right time to sit and talk about it. I was ready for the questions and thought I could take the chance to put Anna's mind down the right path of understanding death.

"Anna, do you remember grandma? She's nanna's mommy"


"Yes, we saw her in the hospital and I gave her a picture of me that looked like this": hands up to her face, tongue sticking out, silly look.

She remembered.

"Well, grandma's heart wasn't doing so good and so she died the other day."

"Oh."

"Yes, a person's heart has to work to keep them alive, and..."

"Oh, KC's in the counter! KC, you're not supposed to be on the counter!"

"Yes, it's OK there's no food up there...Anyway, you and I are going to drive to Louisiana tomorrow to visit family who might be sad that grandma has died."


"Oh, is it a long drive?"

"Yes, and..."

"Maybe KC wants a bug in that window!"

I turned to Paul: well, maybe this is easier than we thought at the age of 4. I really didn't see the need to push a further discussion about death if she wasn't engaged at this point. She knows grandma died. That's about it.

We've decided not to take her to the wake or the funeral. Paul used a good word when he said "cope." As in, she would get the visuals of all of the formality and drama of wake and a funeral without any real coping mechanisms to tie it all together regarding death. I can't see any real point in putting those visuals into her head at this age when death is something in her mind that happens to June bugs when you squash them, and oh, now grandma is dead too and they put her into the ground. If she doesn't understand the gravity of death at this age, who am I to push it on her? She has a life ahead of her full of drama and loss, and at 4, I opened the discussion up and she took it about as far as she wanted.

Death is a delicate topic and moreso than with anything else you teach a kid, how you approach it from the beginning will mold how the kid looks at it for the rest of her life at some level. Ultimately I'd like her to feel at some level that death is part of life and it sometimes feels awful to lose someone you love (who am I kidding, I can't imagine the loss of a child or husband or parent), but they're going on to a different place. It's not just the end. In the case of my grandma, I don't have regrets or anguish. Her body was not functioning right for awhile, and she's probably having much more fun now.

And that's that with Anna. At least for now. Anna usually retains aspects of conversations that pop up again later. And so that's what I'd suspect will happen over the next few days. But then again, maybe not. It's new ground for both of us. Although Pau's much more experienced at this, it's only my second funeral in my entire life, with the first being my grandpa.