There are some tough conversations you have to have as a parent, but few are as existentially difficult as “the death talk.” Because children, understandably, start to get curious about what happens to us after we shuffle off this mortal coil. But unlike conversations about love, sex, taxes, or rotating tires, it turns out parents don’t have any more personal experience with death than our kids do. So we’re kind of in this awful position of being the authority figure with zero practical knowledge on the matter at hand.
Fortunately, TikTok creator Penny (@IWillFightYourDad… great name, btw) has found a truly beautiful answer to this sometimes scary question, and we’re absolutely stealing it…
“When my kids would say ‘Mommy, where do you go after you die?’ I would tell them, ‘I think you probably just go to wherever you were before you were born,’” she says. “And they’d ask me ‘Where is that?’ and I’d say ‘I don’t know. I don’t remember. It might be a place, it might be nothing. Either way, you’ve been there before. Because before you were here if you were somewhere else you were OK. And if you were nowhere that was OK, too. So if you die and you go somewhere else, you’ll be OK. But if you die and it’s nothing you’ve been in nothing before and it was OK. It’ll be OK then, too.’”
Wow. Someone must be chopping onions in here…
Commenters were extremely on-board with this explanation, and not just for kids.
“Okay but why did this make me cry,” marvels one.
“There’s a strange comfort in admitting that we don’t know, but it will be okay,” says a second.
“Are you sure this is an answer for kids?” jokes another. “Because I think you just cured my fear of death as a 35 year old.”
This was a very common response. People with anxiety about death, people who grew up with religious trauma and a deep fear of Hell, and people who had recently lost a loved one all chimed in to share that Penny’s response brought them enormous peace of mind. How lovely for her to know she was able to help so many fully-fledged adults overcome such a primal fear of the inevitable.
As with talks about other big complicated issues, talking about death with your child shouldn’t be considered a “one and done” thing. As they get older, they will understand loss on many different levels. They’ll probably want to talk through a lot of their feelings, which can be hard, but it can also be cathartic. Honestly, it can be a good exercise for you, too, especially if you haven’t been afforded the same opportunity for discussion about your own feelings on death. So be prepared to keep this conversation alive (no irony intended), but it’s nice to have an overarching idea to come back to when we don’t have all the answers.
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