>A Matter of Life and Death

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“This is me at the playground,” four-year-old Punky announced the other day, after drawing a picture of a little girl seated on a swing with a frown on her face.

“I’m sad because my mommy and daddy and sisters all died, and I don’t know how to drive the car.”

I didn’t know whether to laugh or be disturbed. Frankly, I felt a twinge of both emotions. I was proud that Punky had the logic skills to reason that if her entire family were to die at the park, she would need to drive herself home.

But this death thing? It’s bothersome.

And yet her preoccupation with it makes sense. Like most kids, Punky loves animated feature movies, nearly all of which feature a dead or dying parent. The Land Before Time. Dumbo. Bambi. The Lion King. Cinderella. Snow White. The list goes on.

The same day that she drew her picture, Punky had watched the latest installment in Disney’s Little Mermaid saga. “I really liked the movie,” she said afterward, “but there was one sad part.”

“What was that?” I asked.

“A mermaid died,” she said solemnly. “She was Ariel’s mommy.”

“Oh,” I said. Great, I thought. Another death. Just what I needed.

I suppose I could try and shelter Punky from the movies that speak of death, or, like some parents, choose books that feature sensitively edited versions of fairy tales, in which the mothers haven’t all died, the wolf doesn’t actually eat two of the three little pigs, and Hansel and Gretel don’t actually cook the witch in her own oven.

But frankly, the fact that some parents do that kind of thing has always made me laugh. Death is, well, a part of life. Hiding it from Punky seems a little weird and would, I’m afraid, end up lending death a more terrifying reputation than it already has in her mind. For now, death is worthy of a frowny face, but not much else.

I’m relieved in this case that I’m a religious person, and that I have an explanation for Punky about what happens when we die, an explanation that seems to satisfy her. She thinks God is pretty cool, and while she says she never, ever wants to leave this place, she seems to be fairly mollified by knowing that one day, we’ll spend forever and ever in Heaven together, a long, long, long, long, long, long, long, long, long time from now.

Death is the one thing in Punky’s little world that is a bit mysterious, that defies explanation, that doesn’t really make sense. It is not really surprising to me that she’s a little bit preoccupied with it. She’s trying to find a place for it in her store of knowledge.

But it sure doesn’t make things any easier for me as her mommy.

This post originally appeared on Parents.com.