Teaching children about death would help remove the taboo

My five-year-old announced through a mouthful of Weet-Bix that he intends to turn into a lizard when he dies. More than 100 questions ensued regarding life, death and what happens next. Insisting I download an insect detection app he roamed our garden collating images of aggressive bull ants and sad-looking bees with missing stingers. “Can it kill you?“, “How long does it live?” “Where does it go when it dies?”

If you’re like me, you spend hours skirting the line between downplaying and over indulging these existential meanderings, only to lie awake at night wondering if you got it wrong.

Ever the obsessive I scoured the library for age-appropriate literature to assist our conversations, but books were scarce. So I wrote one. Tailor made to fit the space phase, he was the main character journeying from a Big Bang birth to the spectacular return to his “star”.

It was a hit and helpful for a time but didn’t last. With every growth spurt came new musings each more articulate and intricate than the last. Mentally fatigued I implemented a 6 pm cut off, no “d″⁣ chat after dinner.

Loading

It’s true particularly in the West; we don’t like to talk about death. Yet over the last two years we’ve spoken of little else. This is a generation exposed to pandemic and war all before losing a first tooth and since educating our kids on safety, consent and conception is a no-brainer why is Death Ed not on the agenda?

Palliative care physician and bestselling author of With the End in Mind – How to Live and Die Well, Dr Kathryn Mannix reassures, “By encountering death many thousands of times, I have come to a view that there is usually little to fear and much to prepare for”.