I took a cab from work, and it was during that hour it hit me. I have spent most of career working with adults and children with cancer. I have been around death and dying for years, but I have never thought about how you tell a child about death. My pediatric patients often had an understanding of death, some even made many of their end of life decisions, but I never thought about how parents told siblings. How were we going to Poppy? Raleigh was her best buddy. Whenever we were coming home from anywhere in the car about 2 blocks from the house she would start saying "RaRa I coming" and "I see RaRa soon." On the occasions we have had to park around the corner and not in front of the house we have had to deal with uncontrollable sobs as she wailed "I see RaRa." Oh man this would be tough. And after years of talking about and dealing with death I had no idea what to do. When Raleigh had gotten sick about a month ago we had explained that Raleigh was very old and that he would soon go to heaven, and that heaven had lots of tennis balls for him to play with and he would be able to go swimming. We avoided talking about him going to the doctor - not wanting her to later associate doctors with anything bad. She often told us "RaRa poorly, legs hurting" and "Poppy take care RaRa"
So this is what happened. She was asleep, and rightly or wrongly we woke her up rather than let her wake up naturally and leave the poor dog on the couch any longer than necessary. I told her she had to be very brave, and that we were going downstairs to say bye bye to Raleigh because he had died. I told her he looked like he was asleep but he would not wake up. She petted his nose and through her "Why the hell did you wake me up?" tears she said "Bye bye RaRa I love you." The she asked to go back to bed. I took her back upstairs and Robert took Raleigh to the vet. When she did not go back to sleep I brought her into our bed and we laid down snuggled up looking up at the sky lights, and we talked about how Raleigh was in heaven. I told her that he was up high in the stars and that he would look down and see us and make sure we were okay even though we would never see him again. She piped up "Raleigh up in stars." I told her yes, then she says "Raleigh up in moon?" I said yes. She nodded in that wise way only toddlers know and gave me a big hug. So given that I am pretty much an agnostic I think I did a pretty good job on the heaven thing. We came downstairs, she didn't look for him, she grabbed a Curious George phonics book and asked me to read it. Now this is interesting - one of the little stories is about George going to the doctor. She made me read this 5 times until Robert came home and then she flew to him hugging him so tight and told him "Raleigh up in stars daddy." Then she asked to go for sushi.
On the way home she started asking for him, and we told her very quietly and calmly "Raleigh is dead honey, he is in heaven up in the stars." No fuss, no crying. We got out of the car and got to love on Cheddar our neighbor's adorable lab which made a huge difference because when we came in the house she did not look for him.
After her bath we had to read stories - and of course she wanted "dog stories" and the only one I had to hand was "Saying Goodbye to Lulu." Oh this is the one book I did not want to read. I read it twice, I cried, she kissed me and kissed me.
So we do not know what tomorrow will bring, the new day will not fill the Raleigh shaped hole on the couch, for a dog who was pretty quiet of late overall the house seems abnormally quiet now. All I can say is as hard as it was I am very comfortable with our decisions to let her see his body and say goodbye, and with the decision to not use euphemisms for death. We did not tell her that he had run away (my parents did that to me - took me about 32 years to work it out), or gone to live with another family. Yes we used the abstract concept of heaven, but I do feel as if he is somewhere watching us, playing with endless tennis balls, and swimming but that couch is awful empty.
Oh if anyone is interested this is the book - this is the link to author's website.
http://www.corinnedemas.com/books/lulu.html
