Explaining death to children : Leo Buscaglia – The Fall of Freddie the Leaf

One of the greatest trauma in my life is probably the death of my father. I was about 6 years old and when he fell sick, no one really explains to me what was going on. His hospitalisation caused a lot of upheavals to my life. As a child, I actually enjoyed it because all I remembered was the stay at my cousin’s house which is near to the hospital.

So, when he died, no one told me exactly what was going too. I was able to understand Bahasa Malaysia but my cousins whom were very, very much older than me spoke in BM, hoping I did not know. They brought me home and that was the beginning of the most nightmarish event of all.

We had strict, traditional Taoist funeral and there were lots of crying, dramas, rituals, uncomfortable gunny sack cloths, no bathing, no washing of even our faces and my father body was placed on blocks of ice as my second brother were away in the jungles on a scouting mission.

That part of my life probably screwed up a lot of my character. But then, it is probably in a good way too as I had learned to detach feelings when I need to. That was my coping mechanism when my son was dying. I could step out of my feelings, watch and deal with things without breaking down. As a kid, I had learnt to ‘watch from outside’ without being in the picture of sadness as I didn’t know what was going on with this thing call death. Let’s just say God prepares me well to face the life He has set out for me.

The above are four parts of video from the book by Leo Buscaglia call The Fall of Freddie the Leaf. I found this book in the library of College General the other day and it is good that there is a video on it on Youtube. It is a very short, simple story which we can use to explain deaths of grandparents, parents, siblings or even pet goldfish or hamsters to our children.

We need to tell the children that dying is part of life. It is like the season changing. Spring to winter, living to dying. Death will come at some parts of our lives, even if it is just a death of a pet hamster. So, do not fear death too much as it is something inevitable and imminent. We cannot run away from it, so may as well face it.

Today is All Souls’ Day and the homily by Father Fabian makes a lot of sense to me. I have to talk about deaths when I am doing my pastoral care. Terminal patients will sometime talk about what will happen to them when they finally lost their fight against cancer. Different faiths see life after death differently. But I hope what I grasp in the homily today will help them the next time we chat about deaths. I will elaborate more on that in another post.