“I Thought I Could Do It All Over Again” – How to Explain Death to Your Six-Year-Old Child?

 

Parenting involves many challenging and awkward conversations. I’m sure I’ll be nostalgic someday about the times when my daughter was just a toddler and used to ask, “What’s a willy?” The future likely holds some doozies, too, from the first talk about sex to the first warning in earnest about binge drinking.

 

Perhaps none of these conversations will ever approach the profundity, though, that I felt when the fact of mortality first bore its heavy weight upon my six-year-old daughter Sophia’s psyche. It posed the wider question that I don’t have a good answer to – “how to explain death to a child”.

The conversation stemmed from quite a humorous moment. Sophia is a bundle of laughter and playfulness, like most six-year-olds. I was putting her to bed on a school night in June, and it was one of those long summer evenings in Ireland in which daylight stretches until after 10 pm.

 

We were joking around about the flecks of white and grey hair that had started to sprinkle about on my head in my 30s. My daughter giggled and said to me that I’m gonna be a grandpa one day and get smaller (alluding to how wear and tear on spines and cartilage causes a loss of height in older people).

 

But then suddenly, this relatively innocent and playful bit of chatter with my daughter took a turn in a direction I didn’t really expect. Her face grew quite serious, a sort of resigned look in her eyes, as she said, “But I thought that when I’m older, I’ll shrink back down and get to do it all over again.”

 

The sort of bleak realization I observed from my daughter’s expression was very familiar to me as someone with a perhaps neurotic hyperawareness of mortality. It was like the very physical manifestation of a thought that sometimes strikes me, particularly when I’m hungover – “oh fuck, I’m gonna die one day”.

 

This hyperawareness of mortality sounds a bit morbid at first glance, and it can be. The enormity alone of that “oh fuck” thought can be tough to parse or deal with. (I often dealt with it in some less than optimal ways, including more alcohol).

However, it would be disingenuous to ignore the positive roads this existential angst has led me down, like finding the works of Alan Watts (especially the Wisdom of Insecurity), exploring existential philosophy and psychology, and even just appreciating quite profoundly the transience of life and enjoying the small things like a cup of good quality, freshly brewed coffee.

Anyway, instead of explaining mortality and death to my daughter, I thought I would let her comment linger in the air, because it deserved to. To me, Sophia was explaining mortality to herself and understanding it in her own way. There is no second go, no time to do it all again, no shrinking back down and looping back around.

The prospect of dying is a tough thing for any brain to deal with let alone a six-year-old. So of
ten, mortality and death are taboo topics that get put on the back burner, left for another day.

So today, I just wanted to write something to remember this conversation. It wasn’t like those other moments that parents often fondly look back on, like when your kid first cycles a bike without stabilizers, or their first day at school.

But it was a profound moment, imbued with the innocence of youth and the sort of shrewd aphorisms that only six-year-olds can come up with. Sophia won’t shrink down and get to do it all over again: none of us will. And it’s one of life’s great challenges to come to terms with that.