I just reread Frederick Buechner’s novella, “The Christmas Tide,” a story inspired by the suicide of his father when Buechner was 10 years old. He wrote the book for children because he “wanted to write about all the things that were going on beneath the surface of moments like those which I had no way of understanding at the time because nobody ever talked about them.” The intentional erasing of his father, accomplished through silence, led a grieving 10-year-old boy to grow up with a huge emptiness inside of him, a fear of dying and death born from the forbiddenness of words.
Dying and death are not topics we readily bring up in conversation, even with those closest to us. We don’t know what to say to people in the throes of grief, so we say nothing. We tend towards euphemisms: “pass away,” “no longer with us,” “gone before.” Our reticence is even more marked when talking to children. We shield them from funerals and gravesites, believing that we are protecting them from heartache — as if we can shelter them from natural feelings and emotions. We do children a great disservice when we avoid talking about the facts of life — namely, the facts of death.
Holy Week is the perfect time to talk about dying and death with children. Yet in many congregations and homes, we prefer to hop like the proverbial Easter Bunny from the celebration of Palm Sunday to the joy of Easter morning and avoid what lies between. We need not saturate children with the violence, gore and trauma of Jesus’ crucifixion and death. But unless we face the harsh events of Holy Week, our understanding — and our children’s understanding — of the essential truths of the Christian faith are diluted. Simply said: To comprehend and appreciate the incredible sacrifice of Jesus Christ and the unfathomable gift of resurrection, we have to look dying and death straight in the eye. We cannot shy away from the truth: Jesus died. We die. Death is the one thing in life we all can count on.
Perhaps because of our own uneasiness with dying and death, we move too quickly to comfort our children — “Grandma is in heaven now.” And while we believe this is true, it’s also okay for children to feel sadness at the loss of someone important in their lives. We do better to let children see our sadness and to allow them theirs. Comfort one another. Thus is compassion born and nurtured. And death, though inevitable, does not become the unnamed terror lurking in the darkness of unspoken words.
Holy Week is a time to acknowledge the sorrow of dying and death, while at the same time affirming the life that Jesus gives us in this world and the next. It’s a time to lay it all out on the table of the One who is the living word.
We shield children from funerals and gravesites, believing that we are protecting them from heartache — as if we can shelter them from natural feelings and emotions.
