Helping a child grieve for what she’d lost, even IF it’s, something nonliving, but it’s, alive to her, because she was the one, who’d, made it! Translated…
A few days ago, my six-year-old daughter started crying loud at bedtime, with no reasons, my wife and I rushed into the room to ask her what was wrong, we saw her lying in bed, with the Jello clay in hand, crying continuously, “My Slime is Dead!”
My wife and I were confused, “Happy, what is Slime?”, she’d opened up her hand, pointed to the clay, “It is Slime, Slime is my baby”.
My daughter had the look of seriousness in her eyes, and I’d become, even more confused, “Why did it die?”, Happy told us, “It was originally, very soft, I can mold it into whatever shape I wanted to, and now it’d become, hardened, so it’s, dead.”
Hearing up to here, my wife thought that my daughter had an active imaginations, and started, chuckling, and it’d made my daughter angrier, “Bad mommy, what’s so funny! I’m ignoring you both now!”
I’d held my laughter in, tried consoling with her, “Happy, you know why some things die, and some things don’t?” She shook her head, I’d, wiped her tears away, “Things without life, like rock, floor, the ceiling fan, they will break, but they’re not, really dead. Things that are living, die.”
My daughter wanted to ignore me, turned her head away. I’d patted her tiny face, tried to explain it to her in terms she could understand, “Happy, do you know what’s life? If something, it changes, it grows bigger, then, we say it’s, living, like the sunflower daddy planted, the pink zebra inside the fish tanks, they grow bigger every day. The flower keeps on blooming, the pink zebra had baby fish too, but one day, the flowers will wither away, and the fish that we kept, will die. Happy, the beauties of life lie in the fact, that it keeps on, changing, nothing is, ever the same.”
As I was only half way through, my one-year-old son seemed to be in tune with his older sister, crawled, all the way into the bedroom from the living room, lay down on Happy, kept making the babyish noises, like he was, trying to, soothe his crying sister. “Happy, look, your mom had your brother, at first, he can only, lay on his back, later, he’d learned to crawl, to stand, to call out ‘mama’, ‘dada’, and ‘sister’, that, is the changes that life brings, although one day, your younger brother is going to die, but he’d, brought so much joy to this world.”
My daughter started, “I don’t want him to die, he’s so very cute.”, I’d told her, cruelly, “Happy, there’s a beginning of life, and it will, definitely end too, and because some things in life goes away, that’s what makes it so beautiful, understand? We think flowers are beautiful, because they would wither away; we think babies are cute, because they will grow up. So, we must cherish everything that’s living, because you don’t know when they’re going to disappear.” My wife added, “Happy, Slime was originally jello clay, but you’d felt it was your baby, you had, given it life you’re, amazing, okay?” Then, Happy put up her sorrows then, and slowly, fell asleep.
Because this child is still, very young, and didn’t quite understand the concept of the living and death, that, was why it was very hard, for the parents, to calm her down, after her clay hardened and “died”, and, the child was the one who’d, given life to that piece of nonliving clay, by molding it, by playing with it, and, it hurt, for the child, to see the thing she’d take the time to mold up to turn hard, and that was why, she was, grieving for the DEATH of her clay figure…