Prompts for Reflecting About Illness and Death
The following resources – children’s books and short videos – can be helpful to you in fostering conversations with your children or grandchildren about illness and death.
- What does it mean to die?
- Where do we go when we die?
- What happens to our minds when we die? Our souls?
- Why do you think people are so scared of death? Do you think that people are scared of death or of the pain of dying?
- Would life be life without death?
- Would you want to know when you are going to die? Why or why not?
Books
Charlotte, unsentimental and practical, treats the prospect of her imminent death quite matter-of-factly, instructing her emotional friend Wilbur, the pig, not to make a scene. Charlotte does not seem to be at all afraid of death, accepting dying as an ordinary fact of life.
Duck meets Death, who tells Duck, “I’ve been close by all your life.” The two talk about death. On some pages, Death carries a tulip. At the story’s end, Duck dies. Death lays her in a river with the tulip on her body. “When she was lost to sight, he was almost a little moved. But that’s life, thought Death.”
Four children live with their grandmother, and a visitor, Death, comes for her. The children plan to keep Death away from their grandmother, and he tried to help them understand why he has come for her. “What would life be worth if there were no death?” he asks.
After a loss, a young girl shuts her heart in a bottle to protect it from life’s griefs and learns what we lose when we keep our hearts closed.
A young boy is sad when Barney, his cat, dies. His mother suggests that they hold a funeral and that the boy should think of 10 good things to say about Barney.
A dog and a rat come upon a rabbit flattened on the road and consider what they should do to help her. They know it’s important that she be somewhere better than the middle of the road and they decide to move her somewhere. The humor in this book’s treatment of death can open the door to children’s deeper questions.
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