I'm still reeling from my Grandpa's death nearly 15 months ago. My beloved Grandpa, the man who once stood strong and tall, the man who always sat at the head of the table at our family gatherings, the man whose annual ritual was to put a Santa's hat on at Christmas time to remind us all that deep inside, he was still full of fun and youth. His was a slow demise and it was painful to witness. I took M to see him one morning and despite his fragility and inability to speak, he spoke with his eyes and I could see that it was the best gift I could have bought him. He passed away that evening.
After his death, I told M that he'd gone to be a star in the sky. The brightest one up there, in fact. For a 2.5 year old, this gave her no end of joy, the permission to holler up to the sky and shout 'night night Great Grandpa'. In fact, I recall many a time when we both looked up and hollered together, much to the amusement of the curtain-twitching neighbours.
Speaking of whom, a slightly embarrassing situation presented itself last week - upon checking in on my 89 year old elderly neighbour to see how she was coping with the recent snowfall, M asked her if she was going to die soon. Thankfully (in this case), with old age comes near total deafness but it didn't stop me booting my daughter into the house before my neighbour had the chance to say 'pardon?'...
I have struggled with my parental instinct and general common sense recently, in that I just don't know how much information to part with, when discussing life issues with a 3.5 year old. In my household, the comforting background noise comes from BBC News 24 (always BBC, never the darkside aka SKY News - ugh). Unfortunately, this means that M is inevitably exposed to many things outside of her little, fluffy, pink world (which is normally inhabited by princesses, tea parties and more recently, Hannah Montana). In the last few weeks, I have had to explain earthquakes (Haiti), dead soldiers' bodies being repatriated, and so on. What she chooses to absorb, I have no idea. Michael Jackson's death was an interesting one too. We spent many a moment, normally in a public place (routinely the local supermarket checkout) discussing his fate and the fact that he had probably taken a lot of 'bad medicine', which according to M, was very, very naughty. A couple of weeks ago, I was caught up in a conversation with M and her 4 year old cousin, C, who were both watching a newsflash about yet another British soldier being killed in Afghanistan. It went something like this:
M: 'Mummy, what's that they're bringing out of the plane?'
Me: 'That's a coffin, darling'
M: 'Just like Grandpa's'
Me: 'Yes, darling, just like Grandpa's'
M: 'Mummy, what's a coffin?'
Me: 'When you die, your body gets put in a coffin'
M: 'But Mummy, who died?'
Me: 'The soldier'
M: 'But what are soldiers?
Me: 'Soldiers are very, very important people, who fight against the baddies and make our country a very safe place to live'
At which point, cousin C (all 4 years of him), turned to me and said, 'don't be silly, Aunty C, they're not called baddies, they're called the Taliban'.
