Repeated Pet Loss and a Very Sensitive 3-Year-Old: What’s Working for Us
The first time, I tried to be efficient. I scooped the goldfish out with the blue net, flushed him, rinsed the tank, and set about cleaning the gravel. My daughter stood beside me eating a piece of toast. “Where did he go?” she asked. “He got sick and died,” I said. “Where is he now?” “He’s gone,” I said. She looked at the tank, then at me, then went back to her toast. I thought we were done.
We were not done. A week later she asked whether the new fish was also going to “go to the water place.” I realized I had no answer that made sense to a three-year-old, or maybe to anyone.
You should know that my daughter is not the kind of child who lets things drop. She’s the one who runs over to comfort crying babies in the grocery store. She waves goodbye to construction workers and worries about the ducks in the pond when it rains. It’s a quality I love, but it also means that death isn’t something she’s willing to file away neatly. When something dies, it lives in her mind for a while, coming back at random moments like a song she can’t stop humming.
The second pet was a hamster named Mabel. My daughter had helped choose the cage, the bedding, the little wooden house. She named her on the drive home. Mabel lasted about four months, a normal hamster lifespan, though that didn’t make the morning I found her curled in the corner any easier.
I made a mistake when Mabel died. I didn’t want my daughter to be sad, so I waited until she was at preschool, wrapped Mabel in paper towel, and placed her in the trash. When my daughter came home and asked about Mabel, I said, “She died.” And then I said, pointlessly, “But she’s in heaven now, with the fish.” My daughter looked at me for a long moment, then asked where heaven was, and I had absolutely nothing to offer her. I had picked a location I couldn’t explain and removed a body she hadn’t gotten to see.
That night she woke up crying, saying the trash was going to eat her. She couldn’t articulate what she was afraid of, but I knew it wasn’t really the trash. It was the unreliability of bodies – that one minute they were there, and then, without warning or ceremony, they were not.
That’s when I stepped back and thought about what I was actually doing. A three-year-old doesn’t need a theology. She needs a script. She needs to know what happens when something dies, in plain and repeatable language, and she needs to be part of the process so death isn’t just something that happens to her without her say.
The next time a pet died – it was a fish again, two within the same week – I did things differently. I told her immediately, in the simplest words I had. “Sugar died last night. Her body stopped working. That’s what dying means.” She did not combust. She asked whether Sugar felt sad. I said no, because animals don’t feel sad after their bodies stop working. Then she asked if she could hold the fish. I said no, but I held Sugar in my palm and let her touch a fin. She nodded. We got a cardboard box and a napkin, and I let her place Sugar inside. We buried the box under the bush by the porch, and she put a dandelion on top.
I thought that would be the end of it. It was absolutely not the end of it.
The following weeks were the actual lesson. She would be playing with her blocks and say, out of nowhere, “Sugar is in the ground.” She would ask whether Sugar was cold. She would ask whether the fish was lonely. Every time she asked, I gave her the same short answer, with the same words: “Sugar’s body is in the ground. Sugar doesn’t feel cold or lonely.” Repetition was the hard part for me and the helpful part for her. I had to resist the urge to elaborate each time. She wasn’t looking for new information. She was checking to see whether the story was still true.
There is a particular challenge when the deaths are repeated. You start to feel like a bad omen. More than once I considered buying a sturdier creature, but I knew that was not the point. My daughter was doing something normal for her age – taking in the fact that living things end – and she was doing it at her own pace. Making death disappear into a plastic bag and a toilet was my impulse, not hers. She wanted it to be tameable: a box, a bush, a dandelion, a word she could repeat.
I would be lying if I said every pet we had in this period made it through. We had a run of goldfish that could only be described as ill-fated. But with each death, the ritual got a little smoother. She learned to request the box. She learned to choose the spot. She grew less frantic and more matter-of-fact, and I noticed that matter-of-factness was not disrespectful. It was trust. She was learning that death could be handled without her being swept away by it.
What I stopped doing mattered just as much. I stopped saying “he went to sleep” after the first time, when she looked worried about bedtime for three nights. I stopped saying “he’s in heaven” because I couldn’t give a consistent answer about what that meant. I stopped hiding the body, because not seeing it made her invent something worse. And I stopped buying a replacement the same week. We waited a month. When we brought home a new fish, she asked, “Will this one die too, Mama?” I said, “Maybe. Not this week, maybe not for a long time. When it happens, we’ll know what to do.” That was true enough.
There were also sideways effects of the grief. Ordinary things set her off. She once cried in the car because the wind blew a leaf off the window and she said, “The leaf died.” We sat at a red light and I considered the leaf. “Kind of,” I said. “It fell. But the tree will make new leaves.” She was quiet, then said, “When I die, the tree will make new leaves?” I said, “Eventually, yes.” And then, because she is three, she asked if she could have crackers when we got home.
This is where we still stand. We have one goldfish left, and her name is Caroline. Every week, my daughter points at her and says, “Caroline is swimming.” It is a small sentence, but it feels enormous to me every time. There is no clean resolution to having a sensitive child and a series of dead pets. The losses are still there, stacked in her memory like stones. But she has a way of talking about them now that is not fear – it is remembering. She will say things like, “Remember when we buried Mabel?” and I will say yes, and we will sit quietly together for a moment. That sitting is my whole answer. I can’t protect her from the fact that things die, but I can let her keep coming for the box, the napkin, the bush, and my hand while she does.
Please indicate: Thinking In Educating » Repeated Pet Loss and a Very Sensitive 3-Year-Old: What’s Working for Us