Do you remember, as a young child, trying to figure out what death really meant?

Question

When I was 5 years old, my dog, Woofie, died after being bitten by a rattlesnake, and I was devastated. I also became obsessed about death and what it meant.

Answer 1

yes. i remember seeing a dead body at a funeral and realizing that death was the end of this physical body.

this led me to the realization later in life that all compund materials must break apart.

Answer 2

I've never really struggled with the finality of death...or that life always goes on.

My father also was a funeral director/mortician. In fact, we lived next to a cemetary for most of my childhood. Out of all the experiences I had there, one particular event stands out in my memory: there was a funeral for a teenaged boy and his younger brother who had been killed in a small plane crash. The family was devastated, of couse..but amid all this grief and sadness and death in the air, the younger children in the family were running around the cemetary playing with flowers and running amongst the graves...just being children. I remember thinking about what a stark contrast that was between death and life..and certainly a testament to life itself. It goes on, the wheel keeps on spinning.

Answer 3

I accually don't remember when I first learned what death was! Is that weird? I grew up in a home with alot of pets and things just died...my mother was never one to sugar coat things and when it would happen she didnt tell me they were sleeping or that the cat ran away or any of that stuff.I just kind of accepted it I guess. But I can't remeber the first time it happened.

Answer 4

No... when I was 7, friends of my parents committed suicide. I knew death was bad and it meant someone was gone forever. Later, when my dad threatened to kill himself in front of us kids (I was about 8), it scared me something awful... He stormed out to commit the act, but changed his mind and came back...

Later that year, after hearing about the suffering of some of my family in WW2, I would ask my mom why the Jews in WW2 concentration camps didn't just kill themselves... and Mom would tell me it was because they always believed in a new hope for the next day.

I never had doubts about what death meant... but I grew up battling thoughts of suicide whenever the going got tough.

Answer 5

My father was a mortician, we lived our whole lives in the apartment above a funeral home (no, this is not something that just happened in the movie My Girl) . Death was a way of life, they came in, they were processed and then they were laid to rest. Nothing creepy or weird, that's just the way it was and still is.

Answer 6

When I was a child my grandfather died. My grandmother told me that he was in heaven and could see me and would watch over me. It freaked me out because I thought for a long time that everything I did, especially when it was wrong, that he could see that. I knew death meant I would never see him again. That was about it. That and that he could see me and everyone was sad and crying.