Death in picture books and chapter books

Dear Aunt Debbie,

In answer to KPK's comment of a few days ago, I've been trying to think of books which address the issue of death for younger readers.  The only picture book of this kind I remember from my own childhood is another by Tomie dePaola (who is starting to seem a little morbid): Nana Upstairs and Nana Downstairs.  Nana downstairs is 4-year-old Tommy's grandmother, and Nana Upstairs is her mother, and in the book, Nana Upstairs dies.  I haven't read it in a long while, but I remember it being sweet and sad.

Patricia Polacco would also be a good author to check out on this subject -- in many of her books, while death is not the main subject at hand, she takes her adult-role-model main characters all the way to death on the last page.  This is true in Chicken Sunday and  In Our Mothers' House, and The Keeping Quilt has death threaded through it, along with births and marriages.  I've written more about these particular books here.

KPK mentioned The Fall of Freddie the Leaf, which I've never read, but in a conversation on this topic today, my friend Emily cited it as one of the main books about death in her childhood.  She says it's a lovely, gentle story -- Freddie is a leaf, and he grows and then falls and dies, and becomes part of the earth and helps other things grow.

The books I read as a kid which made me think most deeply about death are all chapter books, only one of which would be appropriate to read to fairly young kids.

The first is actually referenced in your previous post as one of the books Doug reads to the kids he babysits (what a wonderful, reference-filled scene!): E.B. White's Charlotte's Web.  I still remember my father reading me the scene where Charlotte dies; I still remember sobbing.  Such a great book, and such a bittersweet ending -- all those baby spiders taking off and leaving Wilbur alone, but the promise of the one who stays, the generations to come.  That's one we should break out fairly soon, I think.

The other two both have protagonists who are about ten years old, and I think that's probably the right age to read them: Bridge to Terabithia, by Katherine Paterson, and Tuck Everlasting, by Natalie Babbitt.  I know I read both of them on my own (and then re-read, and re-read them, sobbing every time).  Bridge to Terabithia is the story of the friendship between Jess Aaron, a fifth-grade boy, and a neighbor girl named Leslie.  They create an imaginative world together in the woods near their houses (Terabithia, of course), and it's intense and wonderful, and then one morning while Jess is away -- I think at an art museum with his teacher -- Leslie tries to go to Terabithia in bad weather, has an accident, and dies.  There is so much in the book about friendship and guilt and loss; it feels horrible and preventable but altogether real.  I get choked up just writing about it.  I heard Paterson once on NPR talking about how she wrote the book after her son's best friend, an eight-year-old girl, was killed by lightning.  The book has that feel of truth to it -- she's trying to make sense of absolute tragedy.

In Tuck Everlasting, a ten-year-old girl named Winnie Foster meets the Tuck family, including one very attractive son a little older than she is.  She learns fairly quickly that he's actually a lot older -- he and his family have drunk from a spring of immortality.  Winnie is offered the chance to drink from the spring herself, and has to decide whether or not she wants eternal life and eternal youth.  I suppose with all the vampire fiction around these days, there are other places kids are puzzling over the pluses and minuses of eternal life, but for me, this was the first time I'd really pondered it.  It's hard to understand at age ten that people might want to grow old and even to die, when the time comes.  I suppose it's hard to understand on some level at any age.

Love, Annie

Dear Annie,

Even though it's past her bedtime, I'd like to start this post with an enthusiastic Happy Birthday to Eleanor! You've been a mother for four years now -- does it feel like that? Parenthood has wreaked havoc with my sense of time: everything in my children's lives feels like it was either just yesterday, or forever ago.

It all goes so amazingly quickly. Four years ago she was just beginning to figure out how to focus her eyes; now she's fathoming why people in a story throw stuff at old men and whether she can make God happy by leaving him necklaces. It's a lot to wrap one's brain around.

I remember Mona asking, when she was around Eleanor's age, "Is death real?" When one is sorting out stories about fairies and worlds hidden behind wardrobes and lots of talking animals, it seems like a pretty reasonable question. There are books that help children deal with the deaths of people close to them (we can talk about those sometime), but the deaths that cry out for parental explanation are the ones that happen in stories. And because child development keeps charging through different stages, one is not always going to know how a child will react. There have been times when I've felt that the death of Babar's mother is much more disturbing to a parent reading The Story of Babar aloud to a three or four year-old than it is to the child. (See a great post at The Twin Coach blog on this topic.) You felt blind-sided by the death of Tacy's baby sister in Betsy-Tacy, but who knows how Ian and Eleanor will react to it when they finally hear it?  It will probably depend a lot on how old they are.  It could be more upsetting when they're five or six and able to understand a bit more what it's about. 

I think this gets back to discussion of social justice books, in the sense that as kids grow, they're more able to see the world around them.  As empathy develops, one can imagine the emotional pain of the death of someone close.  And one can understand mistreatment of a person or a group, even if one isn't part of that group.

Love,

Deborah

Death, religion, and the afterlife

Dear Aunt Debbie,

I'm so sorry the Comment Challenge happened when I was ostriched in my end-of-term work.  Maybe I'll have to challenge myself unofficially during summer vacation.

The books you and Denise have been talking about sound extraordinary and powerful, and are certainly some that I will want to read with Eleanor and Isabel when they get a little older.  War and slavery and the terrible things people do to one another are certainly tough topics to broach with kids; I know there are many difficult conversations ahead.

Right now, for me, the issues that are looming large and difficult are those of death, religion, and the afterlife.  The Christmas season brought with it a first-time awareness on Eleanor's part of the story of Jesus, and there were plenty of nativity scenes in our neighborhood for her to notice ("Look!  It's Baby Jesus!").  As you know, I come from a non-religious family.  While I want my kids to be exposed to and understand various religious traditions and beliefs, I'm not teaching them that one religion is the right path, or that I, or anyone, knows what happens after we die.  Sometimes I'm sorry I don't have this certainty, and can't pass it on to them.

Our conversations about death have stemmed sometimes from books -- fairy tales in particular, where people are always dying and coming back to life -- and sometimes from real-life conversations.  Eleanor understands, sort of, that my grandparents all died before she was born.  Recently, we were talking about Grandma Ruth, and I said I missed her, and Eleanor said, "That's okay, Mommy.  You'll get another grandma." and I had to explain that no, unlike in so many stories, death is permanent.

Last weekend at my parents' house, Eleanor wanted me to read her one of the books from their kids' bookshelf (happily, they saved everything from Michael's and my childhood): The Clown of God, by Tomie dePaola.  I had itchy I don't like that book feelings about it, but couldn't remember exactly why.  The visit before, I put her off, but last weekend we sat down and read it.

dePaola's drawings are, as always, beautiful and expressive.  The Clown of God is a retelling of an old French legend about a poor boy who raises himself up by becoming a talented juggler and clown.  He performs all over the country, making audiences happy with his act, which culminates with a rainbow of balls, the last a golden sun.  His success fades as he ages, and he gets to a point where he stumbles, and the audience throws things at him.  He quits juggling and wanders the country, begging, until he ends up at a monastery, where he sees a statue of Mary and baby Jesus being worshiped during a church service.  After the rest of the people leave, the old clown puts on his makeup and juggles for the stone-faced baby statue.  The show is amazing, best he's ever done.  Then he drops dead.  When a scandalized monk comes to see the sacrilege that is happening in the church, he finds the Jesus statue holding the golden ball, a smile on his face.

There's a lot going on here: death, the idea of doing something beautiful to make God happy, the question of why people would throw things at an old man.  I'm not sure what aspect of the book left me with my initial negative feelings about it; it's quite sweet in a number of ways.  But then there's the question of how Eleanor is taking this talk about God, coming from our house: is this a story to her like all the other stories we read?  Or does the fact that her friends are starting to talk about their belief in God make religious stories read differently to her?  (She has, in the last week, attached two necklaces to the headboard of her bed, and when I asked her why, she said, "To make God happy.")

The other book that came to mind for me on this topic is a very different one, a chapter book for older readers about a pair of brothers, aged 10 and 13, who embark on a saga-like adventure after death. The Brothers Lionheart was written by Astrid Lindgren, of Pippi Longstocking fame, though it bears little resemblance in tone to its more famous cousin.  The narrator, Karl, is a terminally ill 10-year-old boy; his older brother Jonathan is strong, smart, and brave.  Karl learns at the very beginning of the book that he is about to die, and Jonathan tries to reassure him by explaining that after death, they will both go to Nangiyala, the land where sagas come from.  In saving Karl from a fire, Jonathan unexpectedly dies first; Karl follows him, and the two brothers find themselves in an afterlife filled with adventure, battles of good against evil, and traitors.  It is, and is not, the land they were hoping it to be.

I remember loving this book as a kid; tonight, rereading bits of it, I was immediately sucked in again.  There is an immense seriousness to Karl's narration -- it's an adventure story, but a weighty one, and even the ending is not easy or happy.  The Brothers Lionheart, too, makes me itch a little uncomfortably, but in a productive kind of way.  It's a vision of the afterlife which, I'm sure, will spark all kinds of interesting conversation down the road.

Love, Annie

Historical fiction, Minnesota-style

Dear Annie,

Mona was a fan of the Betsy-Tacy books.  I'm fond of the progression of the first few: Betsy-Tacy, Betsy-Tacy and Tib (a third friend is added -- almost no triangle situations), Betsy-Tacy Go Over the Big Hill (venturing out...), Betsy-Tacy Go Downtown (venturing out into small-town society).  They're 12 years old in that one.  Then Betsy, like Anne of Green Gables, just keeps getting older, finding boys, etc.  We quit after #4.  I'm curious what Cyd thinks of the later books.

They're lovely books, but there's a phenomenon with them which exists around other books too: that of the organization of obsessive fans.  In this case, it's The Betsy-Tacy Society, which has bought Betsy's and Tacy's houses in Mankato, Minnesota and is now restoring them.  The books are the thinly fictionalized stories of Maud Hart Lovelace's childhood around the turn of the previous century.  I once met a woman who was an active member of the society and went to frequent (yearly?) gatherings where everyone came in period costume.

As for the infant mortality -- sigh.  I always mention it to parents who are thinking of buying the book.  I'd say maybe half decide not to get it because of that.  Being blind-sided by Baby Bee's death -- as you almost were on the subway -- is no fun.  Yet missing out on the books altogether for that reason feels not quite right either.  Maybe I'll start recommending skipping that chapter.  We got through many books (most notably stuff about women's roles, but it works with medical advances too) saying, "Things used to be different [fill in: for girls and women/ when people got sick/ when kings and queens ruled...], but the world has changed now.  Those things don't happen, or don't happen as much."

Love,

Deborah