When a Child Grieves.

Death.

It is a perplexing and harsh reality of life.

It is something that we as adults know we all one day have to face. As will our parents, our friends...our own children. It is truly the debt that all men pay.

My Wife lost her grandfather this past May. The majority of her family lives in Oklahoma (where we are currently visiting) and when he passed she flew out with her parents to attend the funeral. Because they live so far from us, we only get to see her relatives every other summer when we make the trip out. My daughter had only met and interacted with her Great Grandpa a small handful of times, first four years ago when she was eighteen months old and again two years ago when she was three and a half. On both occasions she spent time at his house, playing mostly with the dog and her own toys. Although the vast majority of her life has been spent with her Delaware family she knew who mommy's Pa was and always looked forward to seeing him, her Great Grandmother, and "Tulsa Lucky", the family dog.

When he passed away this May she was sad, hugging and comforting her mother as she cried when that dreaded phone call finally came in. After that first day she didn't say much about it. She told people who asked that we missed mommy while she was away at the funeral and then she greeted her enthusiastically when she returned, exhausted and drained from the usual roller coaster of happy memories and piercing sadness that accompanies the death of one so dear.

The summer passed with its usual speed and August found us climbing aboard an airplane to return to Oklahoma for our biannual trip to visit with family.

This evening we ventured out to the cemetery where my wife's grandfather is buried. It was the first chance for her to see the grave marker. It was my daughter's first chance to see it as well.

When we found it my wife, overcome with a sudden rush of emotion, lowered herself down to her knees and lowered her head. My daughter glanced at me uncertainly.

"What's wrong with mommy?" she asked, reaching up to grab my hand.

I told her that mommy was fine, she was just still very sad that Pa was no longer with us. My daughter looked up at me, her hazel eyes catching the last rays of the setting sun, and asked if she should go give mommy a hug.

"Yeah sweetheart," I told her, "mommy would like that."

She went over and put her arms around her mother, nuzzled into the crook of her neck, and held her. The two of them held that position for a good four minutes. Choking back my own tears, which were suddenly starting to flow watching them, I held my ground, giving them this moment of comfort together. Eventually my wife rose to her feet, accepting my embrace. While we stood looking at the marker, my daughter ran off a ways into the cemetery. I wasn't sure what she was doing until she came back a few moments later with the head of a red plastic flower.

"You didn't take that from another gravestone, did you?" I asked her.

She gave me the look of exasperation that is reserved for the sole use of young daughters to give to their fathers when they are being unforgivingly dim.

"No daddy, it was laying on the ground."

I smiled at her as she took the plastic flower and placed it on top of the grave marker. She stayed on her knees after placing the flower, tracing the letters engraved in the granite surface of the stone. Pa's name, the chiseled dates of his birth and death.

We were about to leave when she looked up at her mother and I.

"Can I have a private moment?" she asked, her lower lip starting to quiver ever so slightly.

"You want to be alone?" my wife asked her. "Where do you want to be in private?"

My daughter thought it over. "I want to sit in the car."

As she said this her eyes kept going back to the surface of the newly set marker.

"Honey, do you want to sit in the car, or do you want to stay here with Pa while we start walking back?" I asked her.

Her eyes began to water. "Stay here," she said in a voice so low it was barely audible.

"OK sweetheart. You go ahead, we'll walk to the car," my wife told her. We turned to walk back to the car and our daughter walked back to the stone.

After walking a few yards I told my wife to keep walking back with her parents, that I would hang back. She continued on and the picture below is the sight that greeted my eyes when I turned. My daughter, kneeling, head bent so the ends of her chestnut hair almost grazed the ground, her tiny body swaying slightly. After snapping the picture I just watched her. She maintained that posture for several minutes. Then she looked up at me.

Tears were streaming down her freckled cheeks. I have never seen her so vulnerable, so filled with sorrow. She rose to her feet as I walked over and knelt down beside her. She crumpled into my arms, letting out a wail so innocent and so full of sorrow that it penetrated straight to the center of my soul. I knelt there, holding her in the Tulsa heat for several minutes, holding her as the sobs shook her shoulders and buckled her legs.

I finally whispered in her ear that it was time to get going. She nodded her head, the tears still flowing.

"Do you want to say goodbye?" I asked her. She nodded her head once again and knelt at the gravestone one last time. She lifted the fingers of her left hand to her quivering lips, kissed them, then slowly lowered them to the sun warmed surface of the granite headstone. Then she fell back into my arms and I picked her up and carried her out, my own vision blurred by fresh tears.

The compassion  and genuineness of a child is a mysterious and wonderful thing. There is no shame, no pretense, no reserve. It was the most pure and stirring display of grief I have ever seen in my life. It took me until my thirty-sixth year of life, and I had to be taught by a five year old, but I got it. Grieving, for children or for adults, is a natural process that must be allowed to run its own course, in its own time. My five year old taught this to me on a hot and humid afternoon in Tulsa, Oklahoma.  It rocked me to my core and I know it is a moment in time I will never forget.

Rest in peace Pa. Know that you are missed by many.