phey, I think you've already gotten great advice above, and I also think that for the most part this is a phase that will most likely pass. The one thing that I would add is - have you tried gently asking questions to see if something set off this particular phase? My dds have gone through worries like this, but in each case there was something subtle that I didn't realize had happened until I really got them talking outside of their fears. For instance, with my allergic dd, she'd watched a show about anaphylaxis on tv that I had no idea she'd seen. This happened around 6 years old, and she had known prior to that time that her allergies could kill her - she knew it intellectually and factually, but she'd never thought of it in an emotional way and the show (a child had anaphylaxis, didn't die, but went to the ER etc and death was talked about - I think) - seeing it that way triggered fears in an emotional way that she hadn't experienced before. Same dd also had a phase of fears of death when she was thinking about her unknown birthparents (she was adopted), realized that they might die before she ever meets them, and then without me realizing she was thinking through any of this, moved on to worries about her own death. My younger dd worries about death too - more from a fear of God type thing. We are a family of faith, but she processes that faith in a very different way than I do and differently than my values are that I try to pass on to my kids. So even though *I* am not teaching my children to fear death, she's been through a phase where she saw it as a very scary thing based on her interpretation of religion. You can't believe the intellectual entanglements we argued around when she was going through that phase!
I hope your ds is feeling better about things very soon - sending him a hug!
polarbear
