Death

How do we process the fact of death at age 6?  I know that my son tried to process it today, when I read him a children's book (The Forever Dog), about a boy whose dog dies suddenly of an illness.  The boy returns home from school and his mom tells him the dog is at the vet; the dog dies and never returns home. The mom tells her son that his dog will live forever in his heart; eventually, the boy is able to think about his dog and smile.

The story made tears roll down my son's face.  He didn't want to talk about it; he sat there looking sad for about five minutes.  I stayed next to him, dried his tears.  Then he picked up the book and read it again on his own.  I went to another room, as he seemed to want to sort out his own feelings.

It doesn't come up often--the fact that my husband and I are older parents.  We don't discuss it much with each other (not yet), and we haven't discussed it with our son.  But I do think about it a lot.  I feel an unspoken pressure to make sure our son reaches a certain high level of maturity by the time he's twenty.  How do you "make sure"?  It's not really possible to make sure.  But I try.

Right now he's getting ready to sleep by reading his book of Peanuts comics, and he's giggling up a storm, any thoughts of death very much in abeyance.  Thank goodness.