One of the joys of listening to children is hearing their interpretations of life events. Seeing the world through a child’s eyes can put us in touch with parts of ourselves we’ve forgotten and/or lost touch with.
Of Life and Death. While recently talking about my Near Death Experience (NDE) to children, I painted the story in visuals in order to relate events in a way they would understand. When I was faced with furrowed brows, I tried for an analogy.
“Have you ever met someone at the airport?” I asked them.
Affirmative nods.
“Do you remember how you waited for them as they came off the plane?”
Smiles and nods.
“Well, it’s like that. The angels and others who have died before wait to greet you when you die.”
“At the airport?” one of the boys piped up.
I burst out laughing.
“Um, well, no, we aren’t at the airport. We’re…”
How do you describe where you are? I never saw any lighted stairs (no Stairway to Heaven in my experience) and no lit tunnel. Just an incredibly bright room. My aunt, who had passed away 11 months to the day before me was there, as were several others. But how to explain this to children who are asking what happens to the body and the soul, and where do skeletons come in?
For more of my experience, read After Here The Celestial Plane and What Happens When We Die.
I can’t begin to describe the lightness that children bring through their simplistic interpretations, their questions without guile, when it comes to such matters. And yet I know that how we explain life and death is dictated by cultural and religious belief and experience.
Although children understand sadness and pain, they don’t internalize it in terms of life and death. They don’t wear these concepts like the chains that so many adults do. When a child asks, “What happens to all that skin?” they aren’t referencing burial rituals they haven’t necessarily learned of or experienced.
Death loses its hold in youth and innocence. In listening to these children and their questions, I was reminded that the fear of death is often the fear of something else, masked. In truth, it’s frequently fear of a life not yet lived. It’s also a fear not generally owned by children, given the nature of their youth and the fact that their life is yet before them.
Perhaps the answer to questions of eternity are found not so much in youth, but in innocence. The lack of assumptions of what awaits us. Perhaps the idea that living is what we should focus on, not who is waiting for us at the gate.
