Children’s Understanding of Grief

I often find myself thinking about my grandparents. Like, they’re constantly on my mind. It won’t be like I’m doing something and then be reminded of them, or anything like that. It’s more like an anchor thought that I fall back to once everything else gets quiet.

And I start crying most of the time, just because that space is a huge black hole hurting me with what it sits in place of.

I see it very simply. I feel like, when I think about my grandparents, I am not an adult about it. I turn into a kid who wants them by my side forever. And then I remember what my five-year-old godson, also their grandchild,  told me out of the blue.

So, my parents have recently renovated their house, and my godson was marveling at the change, just a kid seeing something new. He asked who helped build it, and I said: “Grandpa.” (Because he did help with some work on the house when it was being built years ago, when I was still a kid.)

And then my godson turns to me with his big brown eyes and says: “He died.” Out of the blue. I didn’t know how to react immediately, so I waited to see what he would do next and how he would process it. Obviously, he doesn’t understand what that really means, but he was trying to explain it to himself. I swear he got this pensive look on his face for a split second.

Then he said to me: “We’re also building a house so we can surprise them when they wake up. We have to hurry before they do.”

So, the house he was talking about was my grandparents’ house that later became my uncle’s, and they were renovating it. My godson couldn’t understand why our grandparents were not there anymore and why someone was changing their house.

It was so heartachingly simple the way his mind understood this. Or maybe my aunt and uncle told him a story he memorized this way, but it caught me off guard anyway. Mostly because my godson is a little menace, and this felt like an out-of-the-blue intermezzo to his usual playtime chaos.

To him, it was just another version of the story. Maybe next time he’ll get with something else, until he’s old enough to understand. Either way, I felt like grandma was sitting right there, with us. She used to tell the best stories, and best believe they were woven with all kinds of meaningful messages.

Hearing that they’re going to wake up, as if they’re in the next room over, just snoozing in the afternoon, and we’ll see them later to spend a day playing cards and preparing gradela, with the whole family under the same roof, was a punch-in-the-gut reminder that almost flew over my head. I was almost tricked into believing it. That’s how blatantly and innocently my godson said it. Children’s understanding of death and grief is the most heartbreaking oblivion there is.

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