"Grandpa Died Last Night": Children's Books about the Death of Grandparents (1991)

"Grandpa Died Last Night":Children's Books about the Death of Grandparents David Sadler (bio) One of the most powerful and wrenching experiences children confront is death, and many books attempt to help children understand and cope with this experience. Authors writing children's books about death generally seem to share the views expressed in Rabbi Earl E. Grollman's Talking about Death: A Dialogue between Parent and Child, and the book edited by him, Explaining Death to Children. In these books Rabbi Grollman emphasizes the importance of parents helping their children to comprehend death, rather than attempting to protect them from the fact of our mortality. While in earlier centuries, and even in the early twentieth century, children were equally likely to lose siblings, peers, and parents to death, children today commonly experience death through a grandparent's death. This fact may account for the extensive list of books dealing with the death of grandparents. My survey has revealed twenty-nine books of fiction on the subject published since 1969. These books range from extremely simple books for young children to very complex books for young adults. Their primary purposes is to help the young understand death and the feelings associated with it. Through their young protagonists, they provide models who demonstrate the ways in which children may react to the death of grandparents. These books have other, less obvious, objectives. As we shall see, the books show young people who understand and value the traditions and memories passed on to them by their grandparents, and who, most importantly, will continue to remember their grandparents after death. Thus, these children's books offer assurance to adults that their values and memories will be treasured by the young. These twenty-nine books have interesting demographics. They present grandfathers and grandmothers dying in nearly equal numbers (fourteen grandfathers and fifteen grandmothers). In contrast, they show far more granddaughters than grandsons experiencing the death of a grandparent (twenty-one granddaughters and nine grandsons). This rather remarkable preponderance of girls suggests that the authors and publishers of these books may think that the death of a grandparent is a subject girls are more likely than boys to find interesting. Making these primarily girls' books, unfortunately, may serve to reinforce the preconception that girls are more sensitive and caring and capable of compassion than boys are. All of these books about dying grandparents present, in one way or another, four distinct stages: I. The relationship between the child and the grandparent II. The illness of the grandparent III. The death of the grandparent IV. The mourning and recovery of the child Understandably, the relationship between the child and the grandparent is very close in nearly all of these books. Often the child is an only child—and, the context implies, the only grandchild. If there are siblings, they are usually not close to the grandparent. Only one book, Hines's Remember the Butterflies, shows a brother and sister equally close to their grandparent. Some of the authors have chosen to show the grandparent and child existing in isolation from other family members. Extreme examples of this isolation are found in two picture books, Aliki's The Two of Them, in which the grandfather and granddaughter form a completely closed circle, without even the mother being mentioned in the text or shown in the illustrations, and LeTord's My Grandma Leonie, in which the grandmother and granddaughter are similarly seen together, without any other family members. This extreme closeness, of course, emphasizes the importance of the relationship and so heightens the significance for the child of the death of the grandparent. However, it depicts an idealized relationship which only a few children have with their grandparents. A book for middle children, Saying Good-bye to Grandma, by Jane Resh Thomas, presents a contrast with the extreme closeness between child and grandparent seen in most of these books. Thomas shows the child with her parents driving a long distance to her grandparents' home after her grandmother's death. There a large family is gathered. The little girl, only one of many grandchildren, seems to have had no special relationship with her grandmother, although she is deeply...