Monday November 1 will be the feast of All Saints Day, and it will be followed the next day, Tuesday November 2, by the Day of the Dead. This will be, for many families, the opportunity to come together to go and reflect on the graves of the missing. But it will often also be, for the parents, the occasion of many questions, in particular about the children. The psychoanalyst Claude Halmos helps us to think about it.
franceinfo: How can we explain death and cemeteries to children without worrying, saddening or even distressing them?
Claude Halmos: All Saints’ Day, where martyrs and Saints are celebrated in the Catholic liturgy, and Day of the Dead, where all the dead are celebrated, whether they are saints or not, are indeed feasts considered by many people like rather sad.
And as a result, many parents are torn between the desire they would have to involve their children in it, and their fear of plunging them into worry, even morbid. A fear that we find regularly besides about death and children. And which often means that we do not dare, for example, to take them to the funerals of the people they loved. While it is essential to do so. So that they have the right to share in everyone’s grief. And because seeing the coffin descend into the tomb, allows them not to equate death with a magical and distressing disappearance.
But, when it comes to All Saints’ Day, what can be done so that this holiday is not sad?
By making it a party where we celebrate life, and the transmission of life. Some adults have a horror of cemeteries because they were dragged there, children, to the detriment of their lives, every Sunday, to mourn at the grave of a relative they had not known.
And, without going that far, visits to the cemetery are often meaningless for children. They see graves, with names on them, like on houses. And they may even have the impression of an underground, incomprehensible, and scary life. But everything can be different if we prepare these visits with them, by talking to them about it beforehand.
How can we prepare them?
By placing death back in the chain of life. That is to say by explaining to the child that the people on whose graves we go are his roots, which he needs to know. Because the roots of a human being are, like a tree, what allows him to stand upright. So, concretely, we explain to him who they were, and his relationship to them. We explain marriages to him, the circulation of names.
This may be an opportunity to make a family tree, but also to talk about wars, where some may have been killed, countries from which others came; and rituals around death which vary, depending on the country. And, if there is, in the cemetery where you are going, a square intended for another religion, a Muslim or Jewish square, you can visit it with the child.
In this way, we make a very rich and lively visit. And, when we come home, to be happy to be alive, we drink a great chocolate, to the health of those who are no longer there.