Gail Eaton Briggs keeps a box of teddy bears in the boot of her car. Not for her own children, who are grown now, but for whichever family she is about to sit with as their funeral celebrant. When a child is going to be in the room for the worst day of their family’s life, she wants something soft in their hands before anyone asks them to sit still and be brave.
That detail tells you most of what you need to know about Gail before you even open her new picture book, Remembering Nanny: Millie and Tom’s First Funeral. It follows two children through the death of their grandmother, right through to the funeral itself, and it exists because Gail has spent decades watching adults get this one thing wrong over and over. Not maliciously. Out of love, usually. But wrong all the same.
“There’s no such thing as too young,” she told me. Not too young to grieve, not too young to ask questions, not too young to be in the room.
The myth we keep repeating
I went looking through everyone I’ve interviewed on the Don’t Be Caught Dead podcast who speaks about children and death, partly because Gail’s episode made me want to check what others had said on the topic, and partly because I didn’t want to write another version of the piece I already wrote about children’s books and death education a few weeks back. This one is different. This one is about what happens after the book closes, in the actual room, on the actual day.
And what I found is that nobody who works closely with grieving children disagrees with Gail. Not once.
Jackie Slater, president of the Funeral Celebrants Association of Australia and a celebrant for decades, put it almost exactly the same way. “Don’t brush off children,” she told me. “If children ask questions about death, answer them as honestly as you can. If children want to go, give them the opportunity to go. Don’t tell them they can’t. It hurts them more if they found out that they’ve been told stories or untruths.”
The research backs this up too. Shelly Skinner, founding director of Lionheart Camp for Kids in Western Australia, pointed me to a survey by the UK bereavement charity Winston’s Wish of several hundred children who had been through their services. None of them regretted attending a funeral. A meaningful number regretted not being given the choice.
So the myth we keep protecting children from is, itself, the thing hurting them.
What’s actually going on in their heads
Lionheart has done something no one else I’ve spoken to has attempted. Over ten camps, they collected more than 270 questions that grieving children aged five to twelve wrote down and submitted anonymously, then had a social worker and a doctor answer them out loud. Professor Lauren Breen from Curtin University analysed the results with Shelly, and the questions sorted into five distinct categories.
Some were mechanical: what actually happens when a body dies, how does it die. Some were about their own bodies: why can’t I sleep, why is my tummy sore, why do I feel tired all the time. Some were about the adults around them: what do doctors do, what is resuscitation. Some were enormous and philosophical: what is the point of living if you just have to die, why do some sick people get better and others don’t. And some were about what comes after: where do you go when you die, will my uncle see my dog.
“The breadth and depth of the questions that grieving children can have,” Lauren told me, “shows the importance of creating an environment around them where they are encouraged to ask.”
Why the soft words backfire
Feel the Magic, the charity founded by James and Kristy Thomas after they each lost close family young, publishes a short guide called What to Say to a Child When a Parent Dies. It has one instruction that undoes half of what well-meaning adults do by instinct: use the real words. Died. Death. Not passed away, not went to sleep, not went away. Euphemisms feel gentler to say out loud, but to a literal minded child they can imply the wrong thing entirely, that Dad might come back, that everyone who gets sick dies, that sleep itself is dangerous.
Kristy Thomas told me the same principle holds for information generally, not just the words used to deliver it. “Children have all of the information do better in their grief,” she said. “If there’s anything that’s withheld, or that’s really sensitive around the topic of how they died, and they don’t have all of the information throughout time, that just escalates. Children are very intuitive and they get it. They know they don’t have all the information, and they have a really clever way of making it about them. It must have been because of me.”
It doesn’t take much to see how this plays out. A child overhears a scrap of adult shorthand, a phrase meant kindly, and builds an entire private theory out of it, because nobody sat down and gave them the truth first. The kindness was real. The confusion it caused was real too.
Give them a job
Gail deliberately never tells the reader what happens after death. No heaven, no specific afterlife, nothing that would contradict whatever a family already believes. What she does give Millie and Tom is a feelings chart, a way to name what’s happening inside them.
Shelly at Lionheart told me the children who cope best with a funeral are consistently the ones who had a role in it. Writing a card that goes into the coffin. Reading a note aloud. Something they chose, not something that happened to them.
Jackie described almost the identical moment from her own practice. Grandchildren too young to speak at a service, wanting to do something anyway, so she’d suggest a drawing or a letter to hand to her, and they’d walk it up to the coffin together, sometimes holding her hand, sometimes wanting to do it alone. “It’s whatever the family wants,” she said. “It’s all about designing the ceremony to suit both the deceased and the family.”
And Leonie Fletcher Adams, another celebrant I spoke with, told me about a funeral for a family so fractured they’d walked in through separate doors and sat on opposite sides of the chapel. Ten minutes in, a granddaughter, maybe twelve, got up on her own, crossed the room, embraced someone she’d been estranged from, and said out loud, I love you. It broke something open in the room that nothing Leonie had planned could have touched. Nobody had scripted that. Nobody had needed to.
Leonie has her own reason for believing children belong in these rooms. Her sister Karen died when Leonie was three. For the rest of her mother’s life, the subject was closed. “You wouldn’t remember,” her mother would say, whenever it came up. Leonie did remember. She’s spent thirty years as a celebrant partly because nobody ever let her finish grieving her sister out loud.
The six months nobody warns you about
The last piece worth knowing, comes from James Thomas. Everyone shows up in the first weeks after a death. Family flies in, the freezer fills with lasagnes, the child is, in James’s words, almost a novelty. Then everyone goes home.
“Grief really kicks a child in the pants six months and after,” he told me, “because everyone literally has got on with their life, and that’s when the child says, well, I’m not the centre of attention anymore.” He described a teacher calling a mother about a boy acting out at school, and when the mother explained his father had died, the teacher said, yes, but that was six months ago, is there anything else going on. “You shouldn’t be a teacher,” James said, “if that’s your level of emotional intelligence.”
It’s why Feel the Magic won’t take a child into their programs straight after a death. They wait, deliberately, until the shock has worn off and the real grief has had time to set in, because that’s when a child is actually ready to use what the program offers.
If there’s one thread running under all of this, guests who may have never met, working in different states, different roles, it’s that children were never the fragile ones in this equation. Adults were. Gail’s teddy bears, Jackie’s letters to the coffin, Lionheart’s grief puddles, the plain honest words in Feel the Magic’s parenting guide, they’re not there to protect children from the truth. They’re there because children can handle the truth, and what they actually need from us is the nerve to give it to them.
