Things not to tell a child when a parent or grandparent dies

[Rabrrrrrr]

Come DU - you people rock! I know you can come up with a hundred awful things to say!

I'll start:

1. Grandpa died because you didn't love him enough.
2. Your mother let herself die because you ruined her life.
3. Your dad died because you lied.
4. If you had gotten better grades, your grandma would have stayed alive. You are such a disappointment.
5. You think grandpa will come back as a ghost? Or a zombie? I bet he does! Probably'll come into your room late at night, all decomposed and gross looking, and he'll probably have an ax or something. Dead people are mean and scary. Boy, I wouldn't want to live in your house! Anyway, sleep well tonight - it'll take 'em a few days to come back to Earth, so get all the sleep you can.

come on - fire 'em off!

[Momgonepostal]

1. 6. Now that Grandma is dead, I'm next in line!

edited to change my number

[Momgonepostal]

2. 7. We had to pull the plug on Grandpa. Be good or we'll...

do it to you, too!

[Rabrrrrrr]

3. 8. I see dead people!

[cobalt1999]

4. 9. We're so relieved that they won't see

what a disappointment you'll turn out to be.

[salin]

5. 9. God loves your grandma and that is why she died... God loves you,

too...

[Rabrrrrrr]

6. 11. You broke grandma's heart with your constant whining

[valerief]

7. Don't cry, Timmy. Grammy is probably not in Hell. n/t

[Burma Jones]

8. Grandma's Dead, but she'll always be a part of you

We made the bacon out of her belly.....

[GOPisEvil]

9. See what happens when you don't eat your vegetables?

[GoddessOfGuinness]

19. heh heh

I may try that one... :evilgrin:

[Iniquitous Bunny]

26. Bwa ha ha!

:thumbsup:


(Thankfully, my children eat their vegetables).

[Rabrrrrrr]

10. Where do the dead bodies go? They go to the school cafeterias

where they're served to the children as the hamburger in spaghetti sauce.

[Momgonepostal]

11. Grandma's dead because she didn't vote for the Lord's...

presidential candidate, George W. Bush.

[Rabrrrrrr]

12. 17. If you can go 10 years without touching your privates,

momma will come back to life. But you can't touch them at all, not even accidentally!

[TommyO]

13. Grandma went to sleep and will never wake up.

Good night, Billy, see you in the morning...

[iconoclastic cat]

14. "People die all the time. Why, you could die in your sleep tonight. Well,

anyway...goodb--goodnight."

[YellowRubberDuckie]

15. Grandma is looking down on you.

Always. She will see everything you do until you join her. EVERYTHING.
Then again, she could be looking up.
Duckie

[RevCheesehead]

16. "Now Grandma's an angel in heaven"

God, how I hate that - almost as much as "she's not dead - she's just sleeping." :banghead:

[valerief]

17. We had to put Grampy in the ground because he smelled so bad. n/t

[Radio_Lady]

18. "We just found out that Grandma left all of us out of her will..."

"FUCK that old lady. She didn't die soon enough!"

"Oh, well. We still have two other Grandmas."

These are actual quotes you might hear when I'm gone.

[GoddessOfGuinness]

20. Everybody's got to go sometime. No sense putting it off.

[politicat]

21. Don't mention farms.

Grandma and Grandpa did not go live on a farm far away.

[struggle4progress]

22. Now let's eat some cookies that taste like Granma ...

[struggle4progress]

23. After he's stuffed, we're going to keep him in your room

[CanuckAmok]

24. "On the upside, we don't have to grocery shop for months!"

[HEyHEY]

25. Dad's dead because you pee.

[Radio_Lady]

38. OT: Oh, HEyHEY, those polar bear cubs are SO CUTE!!!!

[elehhhhna]

27. "Daddy's dead and He's the LUCKY ONE!" my Mom, circa 1979

[CanuckAmok]

51. ...

:yoiks:

[elehhhhna]

53. It broke my heart at the time, but we "kids"

laugh our asses off about it now. Behind Mom's back, of course.

[matcom]

28. every time you masturbate God kills one of us off

[grannylib]

29. Oh man...after my daughter died, I had to FIGHT with her fiance's parents

to quit telling my grandchildren that "Mommy went away and she's not coming back." They were really little, just 18 months and 2 1/2, but even though they probably did not understand the concept of death, it made me LIVID that the other grandparents would prefer to tell them that their mom basically abandoned them.
They finally saw reason...but it pissed me off SO MUCH.
Death does not have the same sting to a small child that it does to an older person, and I felt it was really important to be honest with them and help them COPE, not create separation anxiety for everyone else they loved...would Daddy leave them next? Or me, or Grandpa???

Yikes.

[Rabrrrrrr]

34. Oh, that's awful! Not onyl does America have a sick approach to sex,

it also has a sick attitude toward death - pretending that it's SOOOOOOOOOO fucking awful you can't talk about it, and that's it's SOOOOOOOOOO harmful that kids need to be protected from it.

You are right - kids handle it very well. "Mommy died, and now she's in Heaven." - "Oh. Okay. Can we have ice cream?"

Instead of all the bullshit euphemisms - "We lost grandpa in 1992..." (LOst him? Where? Out in the woods? Did you fucking look for him?) or "Mom left us in 2004" (She left you? Why - didn't like you any more? Did your dad follow her?) or "Jamie went away in 1981..." (Really? Has anyone spoken with Jamie since then? What - you just gave up when she went away? Got pissed she moved to another town?). ARGH!!!!!!

[grannylib]

41. I agree, I hate those euphemisms...dead is dead. Nothing wrong with

that. The one I do crack up over, however, is the one that a former pastor of mine used to use: 'presently dead.'
Thought for a person who believes in an afterlife, that was pretty good *lol*

[Radio_Lady]

40. I had to deal with that with my stepchildren, who were 13, 11, and 8 when

their mother died. There was NO grief groups at that time (1971).

What a sad story about your daughter! How old are your grandchildren now?

My step-grandson had a difficult time with the whole concept of death when he was about six or seven. His father had lost his biological mother at 13(I am the stepmother), and his mother had lost her father when she was four or five years old. (She was raised by her mother and stepfather, and there were two additional twins born of that marriage.)

Anyway, I took my grandson to see the movie, "James and the Giant Peach" without realizing that James loses BOTH of his parents in the first few minutes of the movie.

He reasoned that these two parents who married each other would somehow have an increased risk of dying young. I tried to assure him that it was very unusual for people to die in their 30s and while he would probably outlive his parents, there were no guarantees. I had to reinforce all of this when his great grandmother (my husband's mother) died at age 83.

[grannylib]

42. I'm sorry to hear that...yes, 6 or 7 is old enough for death to have some

real meaning. How's he doing now??

My grandchildren are now 11 (granddaughter's birthday today!) and almost 10 (in a couple of weeks).

They talk about Mommy very naturally, sometimes with sadness, sometimes with "Grandma, tell me about Mommy." They can laugh at funny stories about her, and will ask for the same ones over and over.


The one conversation I overheard that just DROPPED me was several years ago, when they were about 4 and 5. My grandson, the youngest, was talking to his sister, and they didn't know I was listening. He said, 'I know when we die and go to heaven, we'll get to see our Mom, 'cos that's where she lives with Jesus now, and I know what she looks like, 'cos I've seen her pictures, but how am I gonna recognize her voice when she calls my name?'

After I quit bawling, I found some videotapes that had Mommy on them, with sound, so now he knows what her voice sounds like.

I still can't watch 'em without weeping, but glad I have them for the kids' sake.

[Radio_Lady]

43. My step-grandson is 17 now; haven't seen him in two years.

He's in Boston, and will be entering his last year of high school this September. His mother and father divorced, and father remarried an academic a few years ago. We've never met her.

We've moved to Portland, Oregon, and unless our grandson gets pretty mobile with wheels -- or decides to come out here for college, all we will have is occasional visits and telephone calls.

He was such a beautiful little boy -- sharp as the dickens!

We have two grandkids now out here in the same town, and two other grandkids in Salt Lake City, UT.

We're taking the two kids from Utah to Disney World in October! That should be fun!

[grannylib]

44. I bet that'll be a great trip! How old are the grandkids from Utah?

Hope you can maintain ties with your step-grandson...it's obvious that you are very fond of him!

[Radio_Lady]

46. Nicholas David born 7/8/98; Tyler Scott born 5/5/00.

We have two "sets" of grandkids -- three children born before the century change, two were born after!

[calico1]

30. See what happens when you are not a good

boy/girl? You killed grandma because you were bad!

[SOteric]

31. Grandpa's gone to a place

where he's going to make up for all those bad things he did in Germany. - Courtesy of "Slice."

[Call Me Wesley]

32. "The capri pants

gave Granny a thrombosis."

[ZombieNixon]

33. Grandpa died because you touch yourself at night.

:hide:

[Withywindle]

35. "Looks like the Devil finally got her...

...you let him in with your Satanic Harry Potter books!"

[Rabrrrrrr]

36. 36. By breathing, you stole oxygen from grandpa. This is your fault.

We always liked grandpa better than you - now we have nothing.

[Radio_Lady]

39. Rabrrrr, you are one fick sucker -- and I garbled that in your honor!

:sarcasm:

[Rabrrrrrr]

45. I am, indeed, the fickest sucker that's ever been!

Sometimes I scare myself, because I think of the stuff that Goebbels, et. al., did, I think, "Geez, that was kinda half-assed... they should have done..."

Thank God I was raised with a conscience. Seriously.

[Radio_Lady]

47. Seriously, I just noticed that your signature "eye" just blinked at me.

You have an immense amount of "ideaphoria." If you've never heard of the concept, it's described here:

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ideaphoria

This is a measurable aptitude -- along with about 24 others that researchers believe we are born with.

Aptitudes are natural talents, special abilities for doing, or learning to do, certain kinds of things. Manual dexterity, musical ability, spatial visualization, and memory for numbers are examples of such aptitudes. In a comprehensive battery of tests available only through the Foundation, these and many other aptitudes are measured. These measured traits are highly stable over long-term periods.

Ideaphoria is basically creative imagination. It comes in two flavors "oral" and "written" (Yum!) You probably have both to a high degree. Just be careful, lunacy lives here and so does the property of "flitting from flower to flower" and having a hard time concentrating on any one flower.

I was tested in the 1980s by the Human Engineering Laboratories (a/k/a Johnson O'Conner Research Foundation).
Came out on the 99th percentile in both aptitudes. The testing is fascinating. You can read about it here:

http://www.jocrf.org/

[Rabrrrrrr]

55. Yeah, that sounds like me.

On the edge of lunacy, and flitting around; difficulty finishing a job, because the exciting part is the beginning - the planning, idea generation, mapping it out, timetable making, all that good stuff - but the actual doing? Boring.

I identify strongly with Sherlock Holmes, who, when his mind wasn't occupied with a mission or a case or a chemical experiment, etc., went into drugs to while away the time. Thankfully, I don't have a drug habit per se, but I do tend to fall back into the "sit and watch DVDs" comatose state that Holmes achieved with his 7 percent solution.

And add that to a pretty good understand of the dark nature of humanity - what we fear, how the psyche can be destroyed, etc. - and, well, I'd make a good Goebbels or terrorist. Better than Goebbels. :-) I think most of my fear after 9-11 (and I lived in NYC then) was simply that I knew how *I* would have pulled it off, piling up terror for days and days after the WTC bombing... thankfully, terrorists are mostly stupid, and didn't follow my plan.

[terrya]

37. "Dad's dead because he hated you"

"He thought you were a monsterous mistake and couldn't live knowing he sired you into this world, so he killed himself"

[CanuckAmok]

48. Look, she died for your sins, alright? Do I have to draw you a diagram?

[Fleshdancer]

49. Every time you masturbate God kills a family member

and a kitten of course.

[CanuckAmok]

50. Well I'll be darned... There *was* something under her bed after all!

.

[Lisa]

52. if you're good, we'll lower you into the coffin to kiss Grandma goodbye

I swear, this actually happened to a friend of mine, when she was about 3 or 4. She's almost 40 now, and still kind of traumatized.

[CanuckAmok]

54. Don't cry, Timmy, she was a robot. We all are....except you, of course.