One of my goals is to write a children's book about death. I know, bad idea, right?  But I've worked with refugees and displaced persons. I've seen children at their first funeral. I tend to write about things that are overlooked. It seems to me that very few books deal with the sadness of permanent loss.

Here are some things I've heard kids ask or say. Each speaker was less than eight years old:

Why are we putting her in the ground? Heaven is up.

I'm sick and tired of Trey being dead.

Can't we find him? (after hearing about someone being "lost")

I've tried writing a story about an adopted child who wonders if he should be part of family ceremonies on Memorial Day. Maybe it's too complex to mingle adoption with commemoration. I set the death in the past, so that the book's idea was that nobody is forgotten or worthless.  I tried to address belongingness, and to have a hopeful conclusion. It isn't working (yet). 

I recently visited a military cemetery in France where a relative killed in World War I is buried.  I wondered, how would a six-year-old experience this moment? How would she see the tall, slim, perfectly trimmed trees? What would he think of the helpful landscape crew who explained the layout of burial plots by alphabetic block, row, cross-numbers - and then silenced their mechanical equipment while we walked among the graves? There was so much to take in. Gigantic flags. The damp, cool, silent air. The perfect symmetry of the rows of cross and star-topped grave markers that are about the size of three-year-old children. The stairs up. Stairs down. So many stairs!  

This made me want to try again on the emotions around loss. Children experience the same feelings as adults, and I believe they deserve stories that lovingly help them process their experiences. Maybe this is a terrible, non-commercial idea. But if novels exist to help the reader wonder How would I react or Would I make that choice - shouldn't children and their families have options?