DS5 was terribly crushed when his Siberian hamster died. That was his first introduction to death. He's always been philosophically interested in ideas concerning death, isolation, etc. but that made it personal.
As for media, he's totally fine with what most people would think are high levels of sadness-inducing topics. I think this is because since he was very small, I let him watch a lot of movies with advanced themes. I shield him from gory stuff, but that's about it.
Yes, exactly. I think it was just suddenly, shockingly personal; at this point, DD's experience with bereavement and grief was quite limited. My DD is ordinarily the same kind of child. She's very pragmatic, and while she is extremely empathetic and compassionate, she just doesn't dissolve into a puddle of tears over much of anything. She copes very well with heavy-weight emotional content-- even things that many adults struggle to process.
We truly had no idea that the movie would bother her. She just hadn't ever looked at it quite that way, and her (correct) conclusions really overwhelmed her.
She has known that she could die since she was a toddler (she has nearly died). She'd not considered what that would be like from another's perspective, though, and the movie unlocked that awareness all of a sudden; the result was horrified epiphany. Her precocious understanding of her own mortality made it a terrifyingly plausible scenario, as though a crevasse had opened at her feet. Afterwards, we talked a great deal about the choices we make to keep her safe, and why we want her to make those things a habit, too.
We do what we can and then we have to let go of of the 'what ifs,' because life is for living. This seemed to be enough for her, but she definitely took a while to return to equilibrium.
I think that others are right-- it's a matter of cognitively having the ability understand that there are some things which just
can't be made "okay" in any sense, but without the relative maturity to
bear that understanding with the composure and life experience of adulthood. Some truths just have to be held inside like bitter little pills of understanding, without sweetening them to make it easier. (Human beings
are capable of terrible acts of cruelty and savagery, we can't love without vulnerability, there are many things we cannot ever hope to control, and there are things that cannot be "taken back" once done.)
Then again, the world might be a very different place if more adults had full cognitive awareness of those things, too.
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Ahhhh, yes. Santa/The Tooth Fairy/EB-- when our GT children ask us questions, we are so conditioned to assume that means that they are ready to hear the answers, and sometimes we get it wrong. I know someone else whose 9yo son was traumatized by learning the 'truth' about Santa, as well. It took them a couple of years to get him past it, and they have horrible guilt about not understanding how devastated he'd be by having his belief stripped from him.
It's a good reminder that my DD may converse like a little adult-- but she is still very much a child.
