Coffee Cups and Cowboy Boots: Children and Funerals

By Joy Johnson
Issue 106 May/June 2001

Lynn and Jessica were nine-year-old twins. When their mother died suddenly, they helped their father select a casket and the flowered summer dress she would be buried in. But the twins felt that something was missing when they saw their mother laid out at the funeral home. They went home and came back with her favorite coffee cup, a bag of M&Ms, and their school pictures. The coffee cup went into their mother's hands, the M&Ms lay at her side, and the school pictures were placed against the inside of the casket lid.

Rachael's father died when she was 15. He was a terrific horseman and had taught her how to handle horses. "When I think of him now," Rachael says, "I can almost smell the delicious scent of a warm horse and how my dad's boots and jacket could fill a room with a rich leathery smell." Rachael took her father's worn riding boots to the funeral home and told the funeral director she wanted him buried in them. During visitation, and at the funeral itself, the boots sat on the floor beside the casket, surrounded by flowers. Rachael sat in the front row, proudly wearing her father's favorite Stetson hat. "Even today, that hat hangs on a peg in my bedroom," she says.

Americans are just now beginning to see the value of involving children in funeral planning and participation when a loved one dies. My Aunt Bess was born around 1905, and when she was four years old, her mother took her to her grandmother's house, sat her on a chair in the foyer, told her to "stay put," and went through the two big parlor doors. Aunt Bess's feet did not even reach the floor, and she waited a long, long time. Finally her mother reappeared, crying, and hurried into the women-filled kitchen, never glancing at her little girl. I'm sure Aunt Bess's high-topped shoes click-clicked as she scampered across the floor and pushed open the massive doors, just enough to squeeze through. Minutes later the little girl showed up in the kitchen and pulled on her mother's apron.

"You don't have to be scared, Mamma," she said. "It's just Grandpa in there being dead."

Aunt Bess had been protected by a loving mother who did not know how to tell a four year old that her grandfather had died. But even in the days before Aunt Bess was born, when women crossed the country in wagon trains and buried their men and their children and their dogs, we protected our children from knowing about death. In the 20th century, we protected them during World War II when gold stars marked the homes of the dead, and we protected them as medical science gave us wonder drugs, conquered polio, and seemed to promise that we might not have to die at all. We protected them in the 1950s and 1960s, when the word cancer was not spoken and to die of it carried as much stigma as AIDS did in the 1980s.

Beginning in the 1970s, we came to understand that life is indeed a sexually transmitted condition that is 100 percent terminal. As we tell medical students who gather at our Grief Resource Center , an organization in Omaha , Nebraska , dedicated to providing emotional assistance to the bereaved, "One hundred percent of your patients will die...and so will you." Our job, the job of nurses and hospice workers, the job of teachers and clergy and parents, is to remove the dark shroud of fear from death and help children see it as a natural part of living--a sad part, to be sure, but a natural one.

Children Need to Be Included
How can you explain to children why they were not made part of one of the most important events in the life of their family? Rozie was nine, her brother seven, when their mother died. On the day of the funeral they both dressed in their very best clothes and sat on their beds waiting for someone to come for them. They waited and waited, but no one came. Forty-five years later, Rozie was still working out that experience in therapy.

We are often asked, "At what age should a child attend a funeral?" Our answer is, "From the moment the child is part of the family." We add that from age two on up, death can be explained; children should be told what they will see in the funeral home and what will happen.

Be Honest
Tell the story simply and honestly. Children are people readers; they know when you are hedging on the truth. And a parent or grandparent can be the best teacher when it comes to death education. I counsel people to say something like, "Grandpa died. His heart stopped beating and he doesn't breathe in and out any more. When someone is dead, he doesn't eat or go to the bathroom. Being dead is not like being asleep. When you're asleep, all your parts work--you dream, you breathe, you toss and turn. When someone is dead, that part of him or her that was alive is gone. All that's left is the body. The body is like a peanut shell without the peanut or a schoolhouse without any children."

A grandmother was anxious because she was trying to hide her daughter's suicide from her daughter's six-year-old son. She was encouraged to tell the little boy the truth. "It is better that it comes from you," she was told. "Children will tell him later. He'll overhear family members talking. He'll find out, and if he doesn't find out from you, he'll wonder why he was not trusted with this most important information." Grandma went home and took her grandson on her lap. "Tony," she said, "I have something very sad and very important to tell you. Your mommy was very, very sad. She thought that life was not worth living and that we would all be happier if she killed herself, and that's what she did. She was wrong--we are all very, very sad. She was just so mixed up at the time that she didn't realize how it would hurt us. What we need to remember," Grandma said, holding Tony tight, "is that she was a good person, that she loved us very, very much, and that her life was important."