For those interested in a more technical treatment of the subject, Richard Lonetto’s Children’s Conceptions of Death (Springer, 1980) contains much useful in-formation.
Never tell your children what they will need to unlearn later. Avoid fairy tales and half-truths. Imaginative fancy only gets in the way when they are already having enough trouble separating the real from the make-believe. Youngsters need direct, simple, and honest information about death as about everything else. They need continuing reassurance and understanding.
—EARL A. GROLLMAN
“In Childhood”
As Maria Nagy was the first to demonstrate, very young children tend to see death not as a permanent condition but as a transformed state of being. This fanciful conception is beautifully rendered in this moving poem by Kimiko Hahn from her book The Artists Daughter (Norton, 2002).
IN CHILDHOOD
things don’t die or remain damaged but
return: stumps grow back hands,
a head reconnects to a neck,
a whole corpse rises blushing and newly elastic.
Later this vision is not True:
the grandmother remains dead not
hibernating in a wolf’s belly.
Or the blue parakeet does not return
from the little grave in the fern garden
though one may wake in the morning
thinking mother’s call is the bird.
Or maybe the bird is with grandmother
inside light. Or grandmother was the bird
and is now the dog
gnawing on the chair leg.
Where do the gone things go
when the child is old enough
to walk herself to school,
her playmates already
pumping so high the swing hiccups?
Kids and Pet Loss
Losing a beloved dog or cat is painful for anyone, but it can be particularly hard on children since it’s likely to be the first time in their young lives that they are faced with the harsh reality of death. In his invaluable book The Loss of a Pet: A Guide to Coping with the Grieving Process When a Pet Dies (Wiley 1998), Wallace Sife advises parents to avoid the following common “explanations” for a pet’s demise:
Your pet was loved so much that God took it back to heaven. According to Sife, “The child may wonder if God will take him or other dear family members back, as well.”
The animal doctor made a mistake and the pet died. “A child may think that this may happen with people and their doctors, too,” says Sife.
The pet ran away from home. Unless this is true, it should—like all prevarications—be avoided. “Such an attempt at deception,” writes Sife, “may easily lead to distortions in the child’s mind, causing feelings that he or she is undeserving or guilty and cannot be trusted with the truth.”
The pet got sick and died. “The misperceived notion that dying is the result of getting sick may be very upsetting. Children and loved ones also get sick.”
The pet went to sleep forever. A statement such as this can create terrifying asociations in a child’s mind between dying and sleeping. You might find yourself with a kid too frightened to close his or her eyes at night.
As for positive recommendations, Sife offers the following:
Ask the child how he feels about the pet’s death. Reassure him that his feelings are natural.
Hold a ceremony for the pet.
Keep your pet alive in the family memory. Reminisce fondly with the child about the pet.
Inform the child’s teacher about the pet’s death.
Discuss the possibility of getting another pet in the future—not as a replacement but as a new and different companion for the child. 6. Have the child read a book on the subject. A very good one for young children is Fred Rogers’s When a Pet Dies (Putnam, 1988), a slender illustrated volume whose plainspoken text perfectly captures the comforting tone of the late Mr. Rogers.
Pet-loss condolence card. Courtesy of Dr. Walter Sife and the Association for Pet Loss and Bereavement.
For more information, Sife’s book—available online at Amazon.com or directly from the Association for Pet Loss and Bereavement (www.aplb.org/resources/books.html)—is highly recommended.
Death Comes to
Mr. Rogers’s Neighborhood
The loss of a beloved pet is hard for everyone in a household. But it can be especially devastating for small children who have never experienced death and bereavement before. To help your little ones cope with the trauma, you might want to give them a copy of Fred Rogers’s When a Pet Dies (Putnam, 1998), part of his excellent “First Experience” series.
Illustrated with color photos and written in the author’s inimitably gentle but straightforward style, this slender volume is perfectly calibrated to the emotional needs and comprehension level of its target audience. Capturing the lulling cadence of Mr. Rogers’s voice, it offers wisdom and reassurance without evading the painful realities of the situation. (“One thing we know about dying is that it isn’t like going to sleep” reads the text on a typical page. “When a pet dies, it can’t wake up again. A pet that dies stops breathing and moving. It doesn’t see or hear anymore. And it doesn’t need to eat anymore.”) It’s the perfect introduction to a topic that—in our death-phobic society—most parents have trouble handling on their own.
APLB
The Web’s finest resource for grieving pet owners can be found at www.aplb.org, the official site of the Association for Pet Loss and Bereavement. Founded by Brooklyn psychologist Walter Sife after the death of his beloved miniature dachshund, the APLB is a nonprofit organization that serves as an online clearinghouse for all subjects related to pet bereavement.
People coping with the loss of a pet will find a wealth of tools to assist them: a comprehensive state-by-state list of pet cemeteries and crematories; a directory of pet bereavement counselors; a complete bibliography of relevant books (including Sife’s own award-winning The Loss of a Pet, now in its third edition); advice on helping children deal with the death of a pet; and much more (including virtual condolence cards that can be e-mailed to the newly bereaved). There are also hotlines, chat rooms, and a quarterly newsletter featuring memorial tributes, poems, profiles, book reviews, and articles such as “Guilt in Pet Loss,” “Pet Loss in the Gay/Lesbian Community” and “Ways to Commemorate the Memory of Your Pet.”
The Undiscovered
Country: Where Do
We Go from Here?
What’s it like to be dead? That, of course, is the ultimate mystery—the question that keeps Hamlet from making his quietus with a bare bodkin (or, as we say in English, committing suicide). As the melancholy Dane so poetically puts it:
To die, to sleep—
To sleep—perchance to dream: ay, there’s the rub,
For in that sleep of death what dreams may come
When we have shuffled off this mortal coil, Must give us pause.
Of course, even as Hamlet expresses his terrible uncertainty about death, it’s clear that he thinks of it as a place: “an undiscovered country, from whose bourn / No traveler returns.” What gives him pause is not knowing exactly what he’s likely to find there.
ISN’T IT IRONIC? (PART IV)
On Friday, June 24, 2005, Paul Winchell died at the age of eighty-two. A legendary ventriloquist and beloved star of the boomer-era kiddie show Winchell Mahoney Time, he was also renowned as the voice of Tigger in Disney’s animated Winnie-the-Pooh movies.
Just one day later, on Saturday, June 25, the well-known character actor John Fiedler died at the age of eighty. In his long career, Fiedler appeared in many celebrated films, from 12 Angry Men to The Odd Couple. He also provided voices for animated characters. His most famous vocal role? Piglet in Disney’s Winnie-the-Pooh cartoons.
Hamlet’s view of death as an unexplored realm that might hold some intensely unpleasant surprises is just one of many ways that humans have visualized the postlife experience. To the anci
ent Sumerians, for example, the hereafter held no surprises. They knew exactly what it was like—a cheerless shadowland where the disembodied dead pass an endless succession of gray, dreary days—a place, as it is described in the epic of Gilgamesh, “where people sit in darkness; dust is their food and clay is their meat.”
The early Hebrews took a similarly bleak view of the afterlife. In their conception, everyone who died—righteous and wicked, slave and king—ended up in a pit called Sheol, a grim underground realm analogous to the Greek netherworld, Hades. In later centuries, a different notion, stressing posthumous reward and punishment, evolved. Sheol (or, alternatively an infernal realm called Gehenna) was reserved as a place of suffering for the wicked, while the righteous could expect to enjoy bodily resurrection on the Day of Judgment.
Christianity elaborated on this latter conception in its vision of heaven and hell. Sinners were consigned to eternal damnation in a place commonly visualized as a sea of fire. Trapped in this “ocean of burning liquid brimstone,” the souls of the damned were subjected to unending torture, described in vivid detail by revivalist preacher Charles G. Finney:
Look! Look! … see the millions of wretches, biting and gnawing their tongues, as they lift their scalding heads from the burning lake! See! see! how they are tossed, and how they howl…. Hear them groan, amidst the fiery billows, as they Lash! and Lash! and Lash! their burning shores.
Traditional depictions of hell are pretty consistent in their emphasis on hideous, never-ending torments inflicted by jeering devils in a flaming, pandemoniac environment. Heaven, on the other hand, has been visualized in various ways: a transcendent paradise of lush forests, unfading flowers, and pristine, noncombustible lakes; a celestial realm inhabited by harp-playing angels who spend their days singing the praises of the Lord; or more or less anything that represents your own personal idea of eternal bliss. One common element found in most views of heaven that makes the concept so irresistibly appealing is the promise of being reunited forever with beloved friends and family members.
Floating blissfully on a cloud, bathing miserably in brimstone, or drifting wraithlike in a shadowy twilight zone aren’t the only options for postmortem existence. Some societies have pictured the afterworld as a place pretty much like the here and now, only better. Viking warriors who died a glorious death, for example, went straight to Valhalla, where they got to spend their evenings indulging in orgiastic banquets of boar’s meat and liquor after long, bracing afternoons of savage, blood-drenched warfare. Similarly, as one scholar notes, “Many traditional Plains Indian societies imagined the deceased as existing on a rolling prairie, successfully hunting buffalo, living in teepees, feasting and dancing.”
Hell, as imagined in a 1496 woodcut.
This type of hereafter—in which the departed moves on to an existence not so very different from the one he enjoyed while alive—is labeled “life as usual” by thanatologist Robert Kastenbaum, who identifies the main varieties of afterlife belief in his book Death, Society, and Human Experience (C. V. Mosby 1977). Another of Kastenbaum’s categories is “cycling and recycling,” by which he means the perception of death “as a temporary condition that alternates with life or that represents a transition stage between one form of life and another.” An example is the Hindu belief in reincarnation, the notion that the soul passes through a succession of lives until it achieves enlightenment.
Other categories of afterlife belief include “cosmic melding” (the idea that “each person is like a drop of water that returns to the ocean to become a continuing but transformed part of the universal flow”) and what Kastenbaum calls “symbolic immortality” the notion that a human being can conquer death by creating something that lives on in society: a great work of art, for example, or a self-named college endowment. This form of posthumous survival, however, seems disappointing at best, at least if you share the philosophy of Woody Allen, who has famously remarked: “I don’t want to achieve immortality through my work. I want to achieve it through not dying.”
Indeed, the only postlife scenario less appealing than symbolic immortality is eternal extinction—the disheartening possibility that we cease to exist forever at death. Despite the supposedly secular outlook of modern Western society however, the vast majority of Americans continue to believe in an afterlife. According to a recent survey by AARP, nearly three-quarters of the over-fifty population are convinced that there is life beyond the grave. Of that hefty cohort, nearly 90 percent expect to end up in heaven. Opinions differ, however, as to exactly what paradise consists of. One respondent ventured that it is a place where “everybody gets along. It’s always a beautifully clear day, and sunny, with great landscaping.” Others seem to visualize it as a kind of all-expenses-paid resort, where you get to spend eternity surrounded by family and friends, enjoying all kinds of fun-filled activities, including (this being the boomer generation) great sex.
In his richly illuminating study, Life After Death: A History of the Afterlife in Western Religion (Doubleday 2004), Alan F. Segal lists the following points that define the typical American view of the hereafter:
The afterlife will be a better life.
There will be no more problems or troubles.
There will be no more sickness or pain.
It will be peaceful.
The afterlife will be happy and joyful, no sorrow.
There will be love between people.
God’s love will be the center of life after death.
Crippled people will be made whole.
People in heaven will grow spiritually.
They will see friends, relatives, or spouses.
They will live forever.
There will be humor.
People in heaven will grow intellectually.
Those in heaven will be recognizable as the same people that they were on earth.
There will be angels in heaven.
Though a religious outlook would seem to be necessary for a faith in the afterlife—how, after all, can there be such a thing as heaven without phenomena such as the soul and God?—even nonbelievers cling to the hope of immortality In a New York Times Magazine piece, “Eternity for Atheists,” writer Jim Holt surveys a number of current theories of the afterlife, all “based on hard science with a dash of speculation.” Relativity specialist Frank J. Tipler of Tulane University for example, proposes “future beings might, in their drive for total knowledge, ‘resurrect’ us in the form of computer simulations.” In the view of John Leslie, one of the world’s leading philosophers of cosmology, “each of us is immortal because our life patterns are but an aspect of an ‘existentially unified’ cosmos that will persist after our death.” For both Tipler and Leslie, “the mind or ‘soul,’ as they see it, consists of information, not matter. And one of the deepest principles of quantum theory called ‘unitarity’ forbids the disappearance of information.”
The notion that we might end up as resurrected computer simulations or traces of information in an “existentially unified cosmos” is clearly good news for quantum physicists and relativity theorists. For the rest of us, however, the Club Med in the sky preferred by graying boomers seems distinctly more appealing.
RECOMMENDED READING
So many books have been written about afterlife beliefs that a bibliography on the subject would constitute a volume of its own. Besides Segal’s indispensable study, outstanding works include S.G.F. Brandon, The Judgment of the Dead: The Idea of Life After Death in the Major Religions (Scribner, 1967); J. Bremer, The Rise and Fall of the Afterlife (Routledge, 2002); Stephen T. Davis, Death and Afterlife (St. Martin’s, 1989); and Colleen McDannell and Bernhard Lang, Heaven: A History (Yale University Press, 1988). Jenny Randles and Peter Hough’s The Afterlife: An Investigation into the Mysteries of Life after Death (BCA, 1993) is an illustrated pop examination of the subject, covering a wide range of topics, from spiritualism to poltergeist phenomena to past-life regression. For an entertaining, firsthand account of one person’s quest f
or evidence of an afterlife, don’t miss Mary Roach’s Spook: Science Tackles the Afterlife (W. W. Norton, 2005), a worthy follow-up to Stiff, her improbably delightful book about dead bodies and the many bizarre uses to which they have been put.
What happens when we die? Does the light just go out and that’s that—the million-year nap? Or will some part of my personality, my me-ness persist? What will that feel like? What will I do all day? Is there a place to plug in my laptop?
—MARY ROACH
“The Indian Burying Ground”
Modern scientists like Timothy Taylor operate under the assumption that the positions in which corpses are buried reveal a great deal about a society’s attitude toward death. But there is nothing new about this insight. In this poem by the early American author Philip Freneau, first published in 1787, the speaker evokes the Native American view of the afterlife by contrasting Indian and European burial practices.
In spite of all the learned have said,
I still my old opinion keep;
The posture that we give the dead,
The Whole Death Catalog Page 35