Jean Kazez is the author of The Weight of Things: Philosophy and the Good Life (Blackwell, 2007). She teaches philosophy at Southern Methodist University in Dallas, Texas.
When my children were very young, I stayed away from discussing the subject of death with them. Nothing ever happened to make the topic inevitable: no pet died, no grandparent passed away, no president was shot. The word dead was used for speaking about nothing more alarming than dead batteries and dead leaves.
Soon after our twins turned three, we started to notice a strange smell in their bathroom. We speculated and investigated, and, after many months, a plumber came to the house and discovered the cause: a dead squirrel was trapped in a wall. An explanation was necessary, and, for the first time, I spoke of a creature dying. My daughter innocently asked, “Animals die, but people don’t die, do they?”
I gently informed her and her brother that people do, in fact, die. There’s nothing inherently dark and terrifying about the idea that life doesn’t go on forever. In my experience, kids can be very matter-of-fact about things that are highly charged for adults. To an extent, they learn what is attractive, gross, or even scary. In the split second that I had to think about it, I figured they would take the fact of human mortality reasonably calmly. And, so, it was a complete surprise when my daughter burst into tears, with her brother quickly joining in.
In the same situation, many parents would have had a ready follow-up: “Don’t worry. Just our bodies die. We keep living in another place.” I said everything I could think of to reassure them. “Life goes on for a really, really long time. There’s plenty of time to do everything we could ever want to do.” But I didn’t go back on the main point: life does come to an end.
Just a few days after the initial debacle, the children spent the evening with their Catholic babysitter. When we reconnected in the morning, they were in good cheer. They had been relieved to hear from her that death isn’t actually the end. When you’re dead, you go to heaven. My husband and I were happy to let the babysitter’s soothing perspective prevail for a while, but the children turned to us as authorities. They asked us whether her explanation was really true. So now what were we to say?
I’m not one to think it’s always wrong to tell lies, and it’s certainly not always wrong to tell them to children. The tooth fairy visits our house regularly, and, for the record, I have no idea who she is.
But the question about whether death is the end of life is a fundamental one about what a human being is, what exists in the universe, how human and animal life is related, what we can expect, what we should aim for. You can’t very well choose one track and switch later. I couldn’t simply affirm what the babysitter had said.
I started to think, though, that I didn’t have to be quite so adamant about rejecting it. Couldn’t I at least say there might be life after death? I don’t think there is, but it’s not as if I have proof.
The subject continued to come up, and the tears continued to flow. The might, maybe, can’t-be-sure approach never felt right. It’s customary to say what we believe to be true, and ignore the faint possibilities. The “mights” felt insincere.
Then there was the strategy of acknowledging my own perspective as just one among many. I couldn’t really be the bearer of good news about any life to come, but it seemed harmless to admit that other people do see things that way. If it was necessary for our kids to follow someone else’s lead on this subject, maybe, for the time being, that would be for the best.
The whole thing had me surprised and puzzled. I asked other parents how their children reacted at first to mortality. Some friends as skeptical as I am had children who were untroubled by death. A friend who painted a rosy picture of going to heaven and meeting God had a daughter who found the subject of death disturbing. There was no obvious explanation for the level of our children’s distress.
After a couple of weeks of trying to retreat from my initial flat assertion that the end is the end, my daughter finally put a stop to it. “But what do you really think?” she shouted. It was time to get back to the straight truth, as I see it. “Our lives go on for a very, very long time. You can’t imagine how long—it feels like forever! There’s so much wonderful stuff to do in our lives, there’s no reason to dwell on the end. When it comes, we’ll look back on our lives and feel content.”
I’d like to say that straight talk and sensitivity finally did the trick, but they really didn’t. My children could not get a grip on the ultimate End. Great writers like Tolstoy have courageously explored the terrain of mortality. (For example, The Death of Ivan Ilyich powerfully evokes the terror of imminent death.) It’s not weak-minded or even childish to find death troubling. In a way, I admired my children for looking directly at the reality of things instead of being easily distracted. But, in the end, distraction seemed like the best solution.
Some things can’t be talked away. I suspect that many of us once found death terrifying, and, then, we learned to draw a curtain over the whole idea. We normally think and live as if this life really will go on and on and on forever. When death comes closer to us, the curtain sometimes briefly lifts, and some of us reexperience what my children were feeling. It’s honest and authentic to look directly at what troubles us, but there’s also maturity and wisdom in knowing when to look away. My new job, I felt, was to be a good distracter.
For six months after the squirrel incident, the subject of death came up again and again. Finally, one night, my daughter had her worst crying session yet. We were utterly pained to see her in such distress and, at that point, felt completely helpless. As it turned out, that was the last episode. Tolstoy’s terror of death did not subside until he underwent a religious conversion that convinced him that there really is more life after death. Nothing else would calm the panic that he so artfully projected into the character of Ivan Ilyich. My children were much more Tolstoyan three-year-olds than I ever dreamed I would have, but, in the end, they didn’t need Tolstoy’s solution. The subject simply went away.
Six years later, my children are savvy nine-year-olds. They tell me that some of their friends at school believe you go to heaven after you die, and they laugh. Those kids are so naïve. “Be respectful of other people’s beliefs,” I insist. Like our babysitter, these kids are at home in a world I find odd—a world with souls and heavenly existence and the fires of hell. By this point, our children have come to feel comfortable in a world their babysitter would find odd—a natural world of birth and death.
We still haven’t had to cope with a major loss. But, when the time comes, we will cope with our feelings without any waffling. “He had a wonderful life. We’ll always remember him. He’s a part of us.” These platitudes don’t remove the pain of loss, but they’re the truth, as some of us see it. There’s no place but here. We think.
CFI SUMMIT
OCTOBER 24-27 2013
TACOMA, WASHINGTON
Joint Conference of the Council for Secular Humanism, Center for Inquiry, and Committee for Skeptical Inquiry
The transnational secular humanist magazine
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