This week, Barack Obama announced that Sunny, the Portuguese water dog who joined the Obama family during their years in the White House, had died at the age of thirteen.
For many Americans, Sunny was a familiar dog. We watched her grow up alongside the Obama daughters and saw photographs of her around the White House. For the Obama family, of course, she was something much more ordinary and much more important: she was their dog, a member of their family.
Sunny’s death came just as I had been thinking about another beloved animal much closer to home.
Pumpkin was a pony at Holly Hill Farm here in Massachusetts, a place my family knows and loves. When Pumpkin died, the educators at the farm knew that some of their youngest visitors would have questions. Many are three, four, five, and six years old. They knew Pumpkin. They expected to see Pumpkin. Now Pumpkin wasn’t there.
The farm asked me to spend some time with its educators talking about how young children understand death and how adults can help them when an animal dies. For many children, the death of an animal may be one of their first significant encounters with death, and what we say in that moment matters.
A few days after our conversation, Wendy Prentiss, one of the educators at Holly Hill, wrote to me: “We have already changed our language and feel more confident that we can help young children process the news.”
That struck me because changing our language is precisely where this work begins.
Say “Died”
Adults have developed all sorts of ways of avoiding the word death. We say that someone “passed away.” We say that we “lost” someone. We tell children that an animal “went away,” “went to sleep,” or “isn’t with us anymore.” Usually, we are trying to make something painful sound gentler.
The problem is that young children tend to understand language very literally. If we say that Pumpkin “went to sleep,” a child may wonder whether going to sleep is dangerous. If we say that “we lost Pumpkin,” a child may reasonably wonder why nobody is looking for her. If we say that she “went away,” the obvious next question is, “When is she coming back?”
The words dead and died may feel harder to adults, but they are clearer for children. We can say, “Pumpkin died. That means Pumpkin’s body stopped working. She doesn’t breathe, eat, walk, or feel pain anymore, and she won’t be coming back.”
That is sad, and it is also true. We don’t have to make death less real in order to make it less frightening. We can tell children the truth and make sure they do not have to encounter that truth alone.
Answer the Question They Actually Ask
Adults sometimes hear a child’s question and immediately imagine the twenty questions that might follow it. Children usually don’t need all twenty answers.
If a four-year-old asks, “Why did Pumpkin die?” answer that question as simply as you can. You do not need to provide a lesson on biology, mortality, theology, or the life cycle unless the child wants to continue the conversation. Give a simple answer and wait. The next question will tell you where the child wants to go.
Sometimes the most truthful answer is, “I don’t know.” Adults can be uncomfortable admitting that, particularly when children are looking to us for answers, but “I don’t know” does not mean abandoning the child. We can say, “I don’t know why that happened. I know it’s very sad, though, and we can talk about Pumpkin whenever you want.”
Children don’t need adults who know everything. They need adults they can trust.
Expect the Same Question More Than Once
Young children are still developing an understanding of what death means. Adults generally understand that death is permanent; a young child may not.
That is why a child can be told very clearly that an animal has died and, two days later, ask, “When is Pumpkin coming back?” This does not mean the child wasn’t listening. Repeated questions can be part of the way children gradually come to understand that death is permanent.
We answer again: “Pumpkin won’t come back. When an animal dies, it cannot come back.” If the question comes again tomorrow, we answer again tomorrow. Grief requires patience, and so does learning.
Don’t Be Alarmed When Grief Looks Like Play
Children do not necessarily grieve the way adults do. A child may cry when hearing that an animal died and five minutes later ask whether it is time for a snack. Another may ask a surprisingly direct question about what happened to the animal’s body and then run off to play. A child might draw a picture about death one moment and laugh with friends the next.
None of this means the child did not care. Children can move in and out of difficult emotions quickly, and play is one of the ways they make sense of the world.
We should resist the temptation to tell children how they ought to feel. Instead of saying, “You must be very sad,” try asking, “How do you feel when you think about Pumpkin?” The answer may be sad, but it may also be angry, confused, curious, frightened, or even “fine.” There is no single correct response to grief.
Watch for Magical Thinking
Young children can sometimes connect events in ways adults would never imagine. A child who was angry with an animal one day might secretly wonder whether that anger caused the animal to die. A child may think something they said, wished, or did was responsible.
If a child asks anything resembling, “Did I make Pumpkin die?” the answer should be immediate and clear: “No. Nothing you said, thought, or did made Pumpkin die.”
Reassure Without Making Promises
Once a child encounters death, the questions sometimes expand. “Will the other animals die?” “Will my dog die?” “Will you die?” “Will I die?”
Adults naturally want to say, “No,” but that is a promise we cannot keep. There is a difference between reassurance and certainty.
We can tell a child that the adults who care for them are working to keep them safe. We can explain that veterinarians help animals stay healthy. We can say that many people and animals live for a long time. What we should not do is promise that nobody else will ever die.
Reassurance says, “You are safe and cared for right now.” Certainty says, “Nothing bad will ever happen.” Children need the first; none of us can honestly give them the second.
What About Heaven?
Eventually, a child may ask what happened to the animal after death. “Is Pumpkin in heaven?” “Where is she now?” These are not questions with universally shared answers.
In a family, parents and caregivers can answer according to their own faith and beliefs. In a school, farm, zoo, museum, or other community setting, children may come from families with very different religious traditions—or no religious tradition at all.
A useful response is, “Different families believe different things about what happens after someone or an animal dies. What does your family believe?” That gives the child permission to bring their family’s understanding into the conversation without requiring an educator to impose one.
Adults Are Allowed to Be Sad Too
The children were not the only ones at Holly Hill who had lost Pumpkin. The educators knew her too.
Adults sometimes believe that being professional means hiding grief from children. It doesn’t. An educator can say, “I’m sad too. I miss Pumpkin.” That teaches a child something important: sadness is a normal response when someone we care about dies.
The boundary is that children should never become responsible for taking care of an adult’s grief. We can let children see that we are sad without asking them to make us feel better.
Give Grief Somewhere to Go
When I visited Holly Hill, something had already begun happening around Pumpkin’s paddock. People had left flowers, pictures, and poems. Memories were accumulating in the place where Pumpkin had lived.
Nobody needed to call it grief work. Ritual and remembrance give grief somewhere to go.
For children, that might mean drawing a picture, bringing a flower, telling a favorite story, making a memory book, or simply visiting the place where an animal once lived. Participation should never be forced. Some children will want to do something while others will not, and both are okay.
The purpose of remembrance is not to keep a child sad. It is to help the relationship change.
Sometimes One Grief Opens Another
When a child begins talking about the death of an animal, another story may suddenly emerge: “My dog died.” “My grandmother died.” “My daddy doesn’t live with us anymore.” “My mom is sick.”
Loss has a way of finding other losses. We do not need to interrogate children when this happens. We can listen, acknowledge what they have told us, and, when something raises a significant concern, educators can follow their normal procedures for communicating with parents or caregivers.
Many of the questions and behaviors that follow a death are normal parts of childhood grief and do not, by themselves, mean something is wrong. Additional support may be worth considering when distress is persistent, intense, or significantly interfering with ordinary life—for example, ongoing severe separation anxiety, persistent sleep problems, major behavioral changes, extreme preoccupation with death, or repeated self-blame. One unusual drawing, difficult question, or afternoon of death-themed play is not, by itself, evidence that something is wrong.
From “Pumpkin Died” to “Pumpkin Lived Here”
We cannot prevent children from encountering death, nor should we try to construct a world in which death is something mysterious that adults whisper about behind closed doors.
What we can give children is honesty, simplicity, presence, permission to feel whatever they feel, and ways to remember.
The animals children encounter can become remarkably important to them: a family dog like Sunny, a pony like Pumpkin, the cat who sleeps at the foot of the bed, or the goat a child visits every week at the farm. When one of those animals dies, adults have an opportunity to teach something much larger than the biological fact of death. We can teach children that love and grief belong together.
At first, our task may simply be to help a child understand: “Pumpkin died.”
Eventually, another sentence becomes possible: “Pumpkin lived here.”
Somewhere between those two sentences is the work of grief.
