I was that kid.
You know the one. The kid who asked "why" approximately four hundred times before breakfast. The kid who needed to understand the mechanism behind everything, who could not simply accept "because that's how it works" as an answer, and who drove most of the adults in his orbit absolutely out of their minds. Was I hyper? Sure. Did people occasionally want to mail me to a distant relative? Almost certainly. But my mother always said it was a sign of intelligence. I'm choosing to believe her.
That curiosity didn't exactly go on vacation at a funeral.
The 1969 Impala
I was six years old the first time I went to a wake. My Mémé pulled up in her 1969 Chevrolet Impala, that big, beautiful boat of a car, and she told me exactly two things before we walked in.
Suis mes pas, pis garde ta langue dans ta poche, toé.
Follow my lead and keep your mouth shut. But much meaner in French.
She wasn't what you'd call a warmly communicative person. She had a way of saying a ton with a single look that made further questions seem, well, unwise.
So I followed her lead. She signed the book. She steered me firmly into the room with the casket. We knelt. We did the sign of the cross. We left.
Not a single word of explanation. Not one "this is what we do" or "here is what happened to this person" or "here is why kneeling matters." Just move, kneel, cross, go.
I sat on that curiosity the whole ride home. But the second I got through my own front door, I let it rip on my mother. Not for me, as it turned out, but for the domestic tranquility of our household for the next several hours. What followed was a full-throated fight between my mother and my Mémé about whether anyone had thought to ask, before loading a six-year-old into her Impala and marching him past an open casket, whether that might be something to discuss first.
"Why didn't you ask me? I would have liked to have talked to him first. Explained things."
I don't remember exactly what my mother eventually said to me that day. What I remember is that casket. I remember the room. I remember the smell of the flowers and the hushed, strange feeling of the whole place. And I remember knowing that something important had happened, something I didn't have the vocabulary for yet, and that nobody had given me the tools to process any of it.
That memory has stayed with me for decades. And it's a big part of why I believe in the value of funeral service, about the choices families make around death,and that talking to children about death matters enormously.
You Already Know This but Here's the Research Anyway
Those of you who work directly with grieving children already know this in your bones. But for those moments when you need to walk a resistant parent or a skeptical school administrator through the why of this conversation, the research backs you up completely.
This is not folk wisdom. It's also not parental intuition, though there is plenty of that floating around out there. I say this with full confidence and absolutely zero personal experience in the parenting department, which, I believe, sometimes actually qualifies me to observe the phenomenon more objectively. I do not have kids, but I have opinions about them. I find them fascinating in the way an anthropologist finds a remote culture fascinating: with genuine curiosity, deep respect, and a return flight home booked. The point is, when I say the research supports this, I am speaking purely from the literature and not from any memory of 3 a.m. bedtime negotiations.
Dr. David Schonfeld, director of the National Center for School Crisis and Bereavement, has spent years studying how children understand and respond to death. His work, and the broader body of pediatric grief research, consistently points to the same conclusion: avoiding the topic doesn't protect children. It just leaves them to fill in the blanks with their imaginations, which, if you've spent any time around a six-year-old, you know is a deeply unreliable narrator.
The American Academy of Pediatrics reinforces this in their guidance on grief and loss, noting that children benefit from direct, concrete language and clear explanations, and that euphemisms like "passed away" or "went to sleep" can cause more confusion and fear than the plain truth ever would.
Kids can handle more than we think. What they can't handle well is mystery, vagueness, and the sense that something terrible is being hidden from them. You know this. The families you work with need to hear it, too.
Before You Explain It to a Child, Make Sure You Can Explain It to Yourself
Here is where I will slip in a gentle but pointed observation. You cannot give a child a calm, confident, age-appropriate explanation of cremation if you yourself have a hazy or incomplete picture of what actually happens. Vagueness in the adult transmits directly to the child. They can smell uncertainty the way a dog smells fear, and they will exploit it with follow-up questions that will back you right into a corner.
Most of you reading this have a solid working knowledge of the process. But if you've ever found yourself slightly fuzzy on the specifics, or if you want a resource to point a colleague to, I'd suggest starting with "What Really Goes On Inside a Crematory? Understanding the mechanics fully, front to back, is what gives you the confidence to simplify without distorting. You can't translate something you don't fully understand, and children will write their own version if yours has gaps.
But Talking About Cremation Is a Different Conversation
Explaining that someone has died? Manageable, and within your wheelhouses. Explaining what happens to the body afterward? That requires a bit more care, not because children can't understand it, but because the mental images a child's brain will helpfully supply if you're not deliberate about your language can be genuinely unsettling. We're not trying to traumatize anyone. We're trying to explain something real in a way that lands gently and sticks with grace.
Kids already know that all living things die. They've seen it in the garden. They've had fish funerals in the bathroom. They've watched a grandparent slow down. You don't need to tiptoe around the concept of death itself. Normalize it. It is, after all, the one thing every single living creature on this planet has in common.
What you want to be thoughtful about is the how, because the how is where the imagination can run wild.
When explaining traditional burial, you might say something like: after someone dies, their body is gently cleaned and dressed, placed in a special box called a casket, and buried in the ground in a place called a cemetery. Families can visit there to feel close to the person they loved. It's a way of giving them a peaceful place to rest.
That's it. No need for more detail than that, and no need for less.
When explaining cremation, the key is to replace the clinical reality with an equally true but less alarming framework. You don't have to lie. You just have to choose your words well.
Cremation is a process where the body is carefully placed in a special room with very high heat, and the body is gently changed into ashes. It's a kind of purification, a returning to something simpler and lighter. Those ashes, sometimes called cremated remains, are returned to the family in a container, and the family can bury them in a cemetery, keep them, scatter them somewhere special, or find another way to honor the person.
You can tell a child that it doesn't hurt. That the person is gone before any of that happens. That the heat is transforming, not destroying.
If it helps, you can draw a loose parallel to what happens to leaves in autumn, or to wood in a fireplace that becomes glowing embers and eventually ashes. Something warm and elemental came from something that simply changed form. This is where I will resist the urge to make a phoenix joke. Consider the urge noted and suppressed.
There Are Other Choices, Too, and the Kids Already Know About Them
Here is the part where I remind you that we are no longer operating in an information vacuum. The families walking through your doors, and more importantly the children tagging along behind them, have access to more information before they arrive than any previous generation ever did. A curious eight-year-old with a tablet, or God help us all, their own iPhone, has already done research you haven't anticipated. And before you dismiss that as an exaggeration: I was the most relentlessly inquisitive child my family had ever encountered, and I was doing it with nothing but a library card, a well used Scholastic Book Club membership, and sheer force of will. If I had been born forty years later, I would have had a spreadsheet and a podcast by the time I was seven. I was also, by my own cheerful admission, a fairly accomplished little manipulator when I wanted something. Had iPhones existed in my childhood, I would have had a Pro Max before I turned 7. I don't know exactly how. I just know I would have found a way.
The point is, thanks to the information superhighway and social media, alternative disposition methods like aquamation and natural organic reduction are getting serious press. These are not fringe topics anymore. Families are asking. Children are asking. And when a child has already half-formed a concept from something they saw online, you want to be the person who gives them the accurate, grounded, and reassuring version before their imagination runs with the imprecise one.
Aquamation, also called alkaline hydrolysis or water cremation, uses warm water and an alkaline solution to return the body to its most basic elements, in the same way that nature would eventually do the work itself, just in a much faster, controlled environment. The result is similar to cremation: a fine, soft ash that is returned to the family. For children, you can describe it simply. The body is returned to water, the way rain returns to the river, and what's left is given back to the family to keep or to scatter somewhere that feels right. It is, by any measure, the gentlest of the options, and some families find that framing deeply comforting.
Natural organic reduction, sometimes called human composting, is the process by which the body is placed in a vessel with natural materials like wood chips and straw, and over a period of weeks, it transforms into rich, fertile soil. That soil can then be used to nourish a garden, plant a tree, or return nutrients to the earth in a living, growing way.
For a child, this is actually one of the easier things to explain, because it maps directly onto what they already understand about the natural world. Things grow, things die, things become part of the earth again, and new things grow. You might say: this person's body becomes part of the earth, and the earth uses it to help new things grow. They become part of the garden.
There is something genuinely beautiful in that, and children, who have not yet learned to be unsettled by the natural order of things, often receive it with a calm openness that adults have to work a little harder to find.
The Thing My Mother Wanted to Do for Me
My mother wanted to sit down with me before that funeral and explain what I was going to see. She wanted to give me words for the experience before I had the experience. She wanted to let me ask my four hundred questions in the safety of our kitchen, rather than swallowing them in the back of a 1969 Impala and then detonating them the moment I got home.
She was right to want that. And what she wanted to do for me is exactly what you do for families every day. You give them language. You give them a framework that is honest without being brutal, clear without being cold. You sit with them in the hardest moments of their lives and help them figure out what to say to the smallest people in the room.
That is the work. And it matters more than most people outside of it will ever fully understand.
Death is part of life, and children know that. What they are looking for from adults is not protection from the truth, but a guide through it. Someone to say: yes, this is real, here is what it means, here is what we do with it, and you are going to be okay.
And if the child you're working with is anything like I was? Just make sure whoever is guiding them has a little extra time set aside. And maybe hide the tablets.