Our children waste important hours of their lives watching cartoons, when many of the characters are scarier than any dramatic event in real life. More terrible than any image children could have of death, if they were patiently and gently explained to them what it represents.

Open and natural.

Discussions about the death of someone close are gracefully avoided, they are taboo subjects, as if the child should understand that you simply disappear from the earth at a certain point. And that's it. Somewhere, the stories of lives whose endings cannot be explained remain suspended in the air. Earth, coffin, cross, cemetery, are words that are missing from the vocabulary of the younger generations. They are not pleasant words and a child should not utter them, but when someone dear leaves for other (perhaps better) worlds, the little ones accept the separation much more easily if they are told the truth.

I was witnessing a discussion the other day, against my will, about a grandmother's passing and the fact that the grandson hadn't found out about it, because it would have been terrible. "I left him to draw with the nanny and he didn't even realize I was gone, and we don't wear black clothes in the house, so he won't be scared!" The lady seemed satisfied, and the interlocutor, pleased to have received a solution for possible such situations.

I don't recall ever seeing a cartoon character die. Every time, no matter how "tortured" they are, thrown from the air and into the air, crushed by rocks, chewed and swallowed alive, run over by trains and burned in huge ovens, they miraculously recover. After a few moments of suspense and tension, the little viewers breathe a sigh of relief. How beautiful life is and how easily extreme situations are overcome!

I think I went to the first funeral in my life, when I was about 5 or 6 years old. In my dear Bukovina. That's when I listened to the music for the first time, overwhelmed by the depth of those few moments. I went to a funeral procession and tried to understand the words of pain, spoken in sobs. I wasn't afraid, I didn't have bad dreams afterwards, I asked questions and received answers to all my doubts about death. Everything was so normal in my child's mind. I didn't need psychological counseling, just as I didn't need it a few years later, when I lost one of my dearest people, on a warm June day.
He came from the garden, took off his mask that he used around the beehives, and I asked him to stay with me for a while. I gave him a green apple to eat, picked with my little hands, and then, a few dozen minutes later, I could hear my grandmother from the window, begging him to come to his senses, to talk to her, to give a sign that he was staying with us! The last hours of his physical presence on earth, even so, inert, cold, bruised at the temples, lying on the large table in the living room strewn with books, once a place of commotion, all the hustle and bustle, the warm summer rain on the evening of his death, the mourning at the door with his initials, the mirror covered with white cloth, the people known and unknown crying, the hundreds of people who loved and respected him, whom he had cared for with devotion, wandering through our yard, the pillars every evening, the funeral, the pennies thrown around the procession, at every crossroads, after which we would run together with the children of the village, the moment when I understood that I could no longer climb onto his knees, the brown wallet, made of peeling leather, always filled with an amalgam of coins and small vials for the ampoules he used for injections, in which it was hidden well a little piece of Cavit (received on the siesta, without my grandmother's knowledge), all these memories from 8 years old, sad in essence, were never a burden. I didn't need any advice other than from my loved ones, I didn't fall into depression, I didn't isolate myself, I wasn't given any treatment for the unhappiness that sometimes overcame me, especially when I thought that... maybe my apple had been poisoned. I had forgotten to wash it, as my father always urged us (after the pest treatments) and I hadn't even wiped it off the hem of my dress!
I was never afraid, I was never taught to be afraid. I understood that I could love my dear grandfather even beyond death and that nothing he represented, even in the form of an angel, could make me shiver.
Our family tomb is in the courtyard of the little church on the hill, and the old bench and the old willow tree next to it often haunted me when I took refuge there. Since I stopped doing it, not so often, they have both disappeared. I didn't cry then for missing my grandfather (the tears came later), I just told him everything that came to my mind and I was very keen to inform him about what was happening in his absence. I would open the tomb and go down the metal ladder, change the water from the flowers, light the candle, that place had become very familiar to me. And not at all full of darkness.
Whenever we were caught in a summer rain by the stream, near the cemetery, we would take shelter in the tomb. Me and a friend. I smiled at the thought that my grandfather and great-grandfather, the first to leave, were seeing and hearing everything and I knew they would be terribly amused by our exploits! Then, when the rain stopped, we would go out into the fresh air and pick flowers from the soft earth of the neighboring graves, carefully, hoping that no one would see us. We would run home through warm puddles and mud, looking for rainbows, to carry bouquets to sweeten the punishment. Grandma just saw the flowers and knew where they were from. She always knew, because you didn't find carnations, snapdragons, forget-me-nots or pink hydrangeas in every yard, she remembered perfectly who she gave bulbs or seeds of her favorite flowers to, and, naturally, from every yard... someone had died. Somehow, somehow, she always knew it all.
I loved holidays, when I would go (most of the time) with my grandmother to church, helping her carry rolls, a basket of bread, wine and fruit and other treats appropriate for commemorating the dead. We would walk through the streets with packed earth (or mud, really) and the children would gather around my grandmother to receive candy. These were rituals that I remember with undisguised nostalgia. I can still smell the piles of damp sawdust that towered over most of the gates we passed, on our way to the small church where the few Orthodox in the village gathered on holidays.
For us, happy children from the country, funerals were an occasion to meet, to play, to devour sweets without discernment, sometimes even...to drink wine from an unattended glass or to eavesdrop on neighbors' gossip. For days on end, after someone's funeral service, we had made it a habit to light candles, next to the wreaths with still fresh flowers and to watch how the grave was arranged, how a marble or stone cross was placed, pictures in transparent, oval frames, a small square box with glass walls for the candle. Nothing seemed out of the ordinary to us!

I understood early on that everything in this world is connected to life and death. And I try to tell them to our little girls, who listen with great pleasure to true stories from my childhood, imagining the invisible threads that connect them to the past. I often remind them of those who are no longer there. Because in our mother-of-pearl chest, among the lace, silk, small clothes and other decorations that you can hold in your hands, there are so many memories of our loved ones in Heaven, of our ancestors and theirs. Which can only be touched with thought and with tears. And we are the only ones left and who can help them…not to be lost.