That roughly shaped circle we call life

Our entire lives, we are surrounded by beginnings and endings. Firsts and lasts. We organise our lives around a calendar that counts out 365 days, starting in January and ambling through the months until the end of December; we begin our work weeks, groggy-eyed and tired on Monday and count down the days—and sometimes hours and minutes—until the end of the week; we sentimentally mark down our children's first words, the day they took their first steps, the first time they rode a bike; we ache as we recall, vaguely, the last time they nursed or fell asleep in our arms.

But the big beginning and ending of our own lives, we never get to experience first hand, or at least recall and know. The beginning, our births, are recalled and told to us by our mothers, if we are lucky enough. Our end, however, is a reality that we, here in this space and time, like to forget about. We don't discuss it. We don't discuss death in general. And the less we talk about it, the more it seems to scare us.

My children have grown up with death around them. Not in the scary, haunted house and ghost story kind of way, but in the truth and reality of it. They know their Grampa Roberto only through photos and anecdotes, and they know he's dead. They also know their Uncle Jeff, who lived far away and whom they will never meet, not because of distance in space, but because of distance in death. These are very real people to Maïa and Solanne because they have another grampa and other uncles, and these people are beloved and close; Grampa Roberto and Uncle Jeff aren't far off concepts like ancestors whom no one living today has ever met. These are people who are connected through love and memories, albeit borrowed from me.

And so this spring, when we went out looking for the little semi-wild kittens at Nana & Grampa's and found one dying, we told our kids that this little one was going to die. But that its two sibblings were okay. They were suitably sad, we talked about it, and they moved on. Solanne still recalls that little kitten. She talks about how it was too sick to live and how it just died. I'm glad that we didn't lie to them or try to hide it. And I don't think that I've taken away their innocence.

I also don't think that they dismiss life because they know about death. In fact, I think they have a healthier respect and love for living things precisely because they know about death. They try their very best not to step on insects on purpose because death is not something they want to inflict on them; other kids don't quite get it, so squishing a bug is fine, funny even.

I recently saw an interview with Rachel Weisz; she was talking about her newest movie, in which she plays a dying woman. Her interviewer, George Stroumboulopoulos, asked her about death and commented on how we don't really talk about it. The conversation veered to talking to kids about death; would Rachel consider talking frankly to her children about it? No, she said, because children in our culture generally don't know about death, and they might be considered odd if the talked about it a lot.

I find this an interesting point of view, respectable, I guess, but I think that Ms Weisz is missing the point, missing the point that most people miss: kids can handle a whole lot more of the real world than we think. And by "real world" I mean the stuff that touches us profoundly, that makes us human. Stuff like birth and death, heart break and celebration, anger at injustice. Why do we shield our children from these truths?

I don't mean that children can handle violence, especially gratuitous violence; in fact, violence on television and in video games make light of death. It's not real, so children (and so many adults) don't know how to handle death in their lives. I don't mean that children should be made to witness the horrors of war or famine; one day they will be ready for that, and I dare hope that they will be equipped to feel it keenly and to work for justice. For now, they're still processing what it means that a kitten is too small and weak to make it in this tough world. I will not intentionally expose my children to sorrow, but I will not hide it from them when it is linked in a tangible way to their own existence. I truly hope and deeply believe that this does not, and will not, make them odd. It makes them more fully human.