A short while ago, I went to my local library to grab some new books for my daughter who is 10. While she loves living in a world of magic and fantasy where dragons abound, I came across a book that was outside of that genre – Joanne Levy’s “Sorry for your Loss.” As a social worker who works with older people, including those at the end of life, the title caught my eye and I picked it up, hoping that it might provide a good entry point into discussing death.
By all accounts, the book should work well as grief education. Levy clearly explains the physical realities of what happens to the body after death, alongside a story of growing friendship between two grief-stricken young people. The book is written through a Jewish lens and explains many Jewish customs surrounding death. This was a new perspective for me and I found it interesting. What suprised me most, however, was the difference between what I took from the book as a mother with prior experience of death and what my 10-year old daughter took from the book. I was looking for a lesson, but the lesson of the book was not the lesson she found.
The book takes place in 12-year-old Evie Walman’s world. Her parents own a Jewish Funeral home, and Evie helps out with various things. She has grown up around her parent’s business even helping to hand out funeral leaflets. Then she meets Oren Katzman, also 12 years old, who has just lost both his parents in a car accident. Throughout the book, Oren is mute as a result of his profound grief and the guilt he feels for the death of his parents. He answers in non-verbal ways, and over the summer Evie befriends him, even though she often says she cannot be friends (we learn later that a friend of hers had died, so she does not want to get close to anyone again). Evie teaches Oren quilling, a craft technique that involves spiralling strips of paper to make shapes on a picture. Through crafting, they become friends, and eventually Oren starts speaking again.
My 10-year-old daughter agreed to read it. When we talked about it afterwards, I discovered that what we took from the story was very different. From my perspective as a mother, Evie seemed very young to be surrounded by death, sadness, and other people’s grief. My daughter, however, was more interested in the crafting that brought the two friends together than in Evie’s efforts to become someone Oren could open up to about his grief.
This book made me realise that, as much as I want to foreground the importance of death in shaping life, learning, and acceptance, my 10-year-old daughter may not be quite ready for that shift. And why should she? I wish for her a long and happy life. But now, in my middle years, I know that a long and happy life comes with losses. I want to give her the tools to keep moving forward in the face of those losses however they might change her.
Recently, and since we read this book, my father has died. He had been in hospital for several months, so I guess it wasn’t a surprise, but it did feel sudden. We had been out eating a Mother’s Day brunch when I got the call from the hospital that my dad had taken a turn. I was at the hospital within 10 minutes, and in seeing how he was no longer responding, I messaged my husband to come through and bring our daughter. We had explained to her that grandpa’s health was getting worse. She came with my husband and spent the next couple of hours with her grandpa. I encouraged her to talk to him, tell him some of her favourite memories she had of him. She held his hand as she spoke to him. And she was with me, and with him, when he took his final breath. She asked questions and I answered as honestly as I could. As my father had not been one to want to talk about death, I used that time to explain his changes in breathing, and the noises to her that he might make, but I also said it hoping he would hear me, and find this end of life calmer, knowing his hearing would be the last sense to go.
At supper this evening when I asked my daughter about being there, and if she had been scared, she said no. She was able to recognize that things are only scary if we allow them to be, and she saw how peaceful it was, and recognised she got the chance to say goodbye. We try to protect our children from death, rather than see the beauty in the transformative process. As a mother, my wanting her to learn about death through a book didn’t work the way I had hoped it would. It was the lived experience of sitting with her grandpa, holding his hand, singing to him and telling him she will miss him before he took that final breath that I believe will have the most impact for her. I was able to be with her when she experienced her first death. I am glad that I won’t be her first death. And while some things can be learned from a book, others are only learned by being present, and by holding someone’s hand at the end of life.
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Norma Reather finished her MSc in End of Life Studies and graduated with the class of 2024. She is a Psychotherapist who works with adults 65+ in Northwestern Ontario Canada for the Canadian Mental Health Association Fort Frances Branch. Norma has worked with seniors for over 20 years in Canada, the USA, and the UK. Norma is a wife and mother of a precocious, nearly 11 year old.
She is appreciative of the MSc course leaders for sharing their knowledge and theory, and she is grateful to her father for teaching her (and her daughter) during his life and in his death.