BackGranny is not a star
Books for children that look death, and the sorrow and anger that follows, in the eye
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The impermanence of life has been a subject of deliberation by poets, philosophers, academics and non-academics alike down the ages. Young children, however, tend to be kept outside the purview of even casual conversations because of the heart-crushing nature of the beast; the reasoning being that knowing that everyone who is a part of your world has to die is a burden too heavy to carry at a young age.
But is it, always? There is a school of thought which believes that knowing death comes to all can be an equally liberating, the-show-must-go-on meme, once you’re resigned to the inevitability of it. The sooner children don this armour shorn of sugar-coated gloss, the more prepared we make them to handle the many hiccups in life that prelude that finality. Granny did not become a star, and no, she is not looking at you from somewhere up there—are children’s books helping us to call a spade a spade?
Picture books, in particular, are great conversation starters between an adult and a very young child. Snuggled up with one in hand, my children and I have read about them all—sudden deaths, death after a prolonged illness, accidental deaths, a grandparent’s death, a child’s death, a parent’s death, a stranger’s death, and more. There are books in which Papa goes away, never to return (Boats For Papa by Jessixa Bagley). There are books in which Mama leaves without her clothes and her shoes, never to be seen again (Missing Mommy by Rebecca Cobb). Or books where the beloved pet dies all of a sudden, never to “wriggle from the bottom of his bed to the top" (Harry & Hopper by Margaret Wild). The lonely personal journeys that the children left behind must undertake to deal with their loss are of epic proportions; a good picture book captures this between its 32 pages with skill, sensitivity and, sometimes, humour. It not only takes a young reader along on this journey, it also helps parents to start talking about these darker subjects. It’s literature in its most intense, concise, accessible and relatable form.
But there are books that go deeper.
In Cry, Heart, But Never Break by Glen Ringtved, the children gather around the table with Death—Yamraj in another form—as he comes for Grandma, and try to stop him. Kind and compassionate Death helps them (and the reader) understand a most profound truth about life, something even adults struggle to come to terms with in their lifetime—that life and death, just like sorrow and joy, or night and day, or sun and rain, are worthwhile because of each other; for you cannot enjoy one without the other.
As an aside, it is interesting that in cultures like ours, where listening to stories is our first exposure to the world of words and happenings fair and unfair, it is our grandparents who have already prepared us for Yamraj even before our cognitive speech has developed.
Nothing, however, can prepare one for the grief that comes in the wake of a loss. In Michael Rosen’s Sad Book, Rosen attempts to describe the sadness that clings “all over (you)" at the death of his son. It’s an honest bare-all manual of what he feels (“sometimes this makes me very angry"), how that sadness creeps in (“it’s just a cloud that comes along and covers me up"), and what he tries to do to shake it off. But gloom, unlike the fleeting good memories, fleeting little triumphs throughout the day, fleeting acts of kindness done during the waking hours, is permanent. “It’s just because." Period.
The anger that the boy feels has a therapeutic calm in it that the reader may identify with and stop feeling guilty about how grief may be making us behave out of character. There’s also a shocking, “Well, good riddance", from the boy when he gets to know his mother died the previous night. This seems less edgy if we recall the one final goodbye-of-sorts conversation they had that same night before he stomped out in anger. “She shouldn’t have had a kid if she was going to leave before he was grown up."
Missing Mommy, on the other hand, comes padded with an inbuilt shock absorber—in the form of a child protagonist to whom the meaning of death, the permanency of the loss, is broken gently (like The Scar, this too is a first-person narrative, giving it a similar immediacy). The concept and purport of death, therefore, emerges in a manner that makes it simpler for young children to fathom.
And then there are books that can startle you with the simple, yet profound ways in which children could make sense of the death of strangers (The Flat Rabbit, The Frog and The Birdsong). Respect for the dead is paramount.
A while ago, my daughter (now 11) and I were reading Oliver Jeffers’ Heart And The Bottle. It’s a poignant, sparkling gem of a tale of a “little girl, much like any other, whose head was filled with curiosities of the world". Fuelling and refuelling this curiosity is her father, sitting there in an armchair, reading out book after book to her, “until the day she found an empty chair". In one of those moments when the reading aloud becomes a lovely projection of shared experiences, I asked my girl, “If I were to die today, would you continue to read picture books at bedtime, at odd hours, whenever, like we do now?" A momentary considered pause in breath and words later, she said, “You are?—oh, I know—it’s supposing. Yes, I would. It’ll keep you still alive for me. That’s a good thing." And then she turned it around on me, “Would you, if I were to?"
I didn’t have to think before nodding, using pretty much the same practical logic as hers. In that special flash of bonding, our secret pact was made and sealed without us having looked at each other even once; our gaze still fixed on the empty chair in that book we were holding together.
Picture books are that sort of thing. They compel you to experience you and yours through them, no matter how difficult the subject is. Together.
Richa Jha is an author, and the founder of Pickle Yolk Books.
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