How Do You Explain Death to a Child?

I do not know. I am the first to admit that these types of topics have baffled me. I have found, though, that honesty is the best.

I do not have small children anymore so I feel like I am ill equipped to write a blog on this topic. But, my sister just died of triple negative breast cancer and my mentally disabled brother really struggled to understand. He just couldn’t figure out why God hadn’t answered his prayers when he had prayed for her healing. I had then encouraged him to pray, rather, that we could accept God’s will and to ask that my sister wouldn’t suffer long.

Then of course, he thought God should take her right away. These are hard things to explain and there are no easy answers. I tried to help him see how these last lingering weeks were a gift from God, that we had my sister longer than we had expected, and that we were thankful for each day with her.

The funeral was incredibly hard for my brother and to prepare him I gave him this little example,

“You have seen an egg right?”

“ Oh yes”

“You have seen what an egg looks like after a bird hatches?”

He had

Think about that little bird flying around. Does it need its shell any more?

Well, no it didn’t.

“What do we do with the shell?”

“We put it in the compost bin”

I told him, “ When Jesus took our sister to heaven she was just like a little bird that hatched and flew away. The body she left behind isn’t her anymore. Its just a shell. We are more respectful of people than we are of eggs though. We put them in a casket and we have a funeral. Than we put the casket in the ground and cover it up. But it’s just a shell.”

This totally made sense to my brother. His words were “ So we just put her back to the earth.” Somehow this made death less cold and unfriendly even to me.

I thought my story might help someone else trying to explain this topic to a grieving child.

I created this coloring page to remind myself that our bodies are just a shell out of which a beautiful bird will hatch and fly away.