One of the hard things when you lose someone close is how to break the news to your children. Their pain can be worse to witness than what you're feeling yourself. However, we're open and honest with our children and so we've sat them down and explained about Great Grandad.
Emily's old enough to be devastated and was very upset on Friday. We also made the decision to let her decide if she'd like to go to the funeral. We've explained exactly what a funeral involves and she's been so grown up in making her decision to go. In fact, I couldn't be more proud of how Emily's handled this whole situation, she's shown a level of maturity and compassion way beyond her years. What a girl she is!
Xander's been fairly good. We weren't going to tell him, an autistic 4-year-old doesn't necessarily have the right thought processes to understand death. However, we decided to be honest with him as not being could cause more confusion for him. Do you know, he's done great with it. His fish died a couple of weeks ago so we've told him Grandad's up in the sky taking care of Ferb, and that seems to be working for him!
Anyway, I decided that as well as us looking through pictures of Grandad, it'd be good to get the kids involved in something to remember him by. With it coming up to summer we'll (hopefully) be spending a lot of time in the garden, and Grandad always loved sitting looking out at his garden, so that was the route we took. We went out and bought a lily plant. When we came home I enlisted Xander to collect stones to provide drainage for our pot:
Which he did in his wheelbarrow then placed them carefully in the pot:
Then both kids got to filling the pot with compost:
And voila, a beautiful lily plant for us to remember Grandad this summer while we're out in the garden:
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