Childhood Traumas: Death

How does a child deal with someone close dying? In countries like I have been to in India and Nepal (at least in the 1980s) when I was there death was everywhere I went, death and dying. I was 37 years old at the time but I found that seeing death and dying literally everywhere I went sort of comforting simply because as an American Culture we constantly hide death from women and children (at least we did while I was growing up. So, I guess the debate would have to be on whether it is better to allow children and women to see death and dying when it happens or whether this should be hidden from them both.

I think the part about hiding death from women has been settled mostly by equal rights movement so now only children are infantilised but no longer women (at least in the U.S).

However, for some reason because of this change children are now often infantilised until 30 years of age or more if they aren't in the military or something like this still now, whereas as a young man of 4 years old in 1952 I was expected to prepare for death as a soldier even then and by age 8 was given my own rifle and bullets to keep in my bedroom as a sign of honor and trust as a fellow defender of the family from critters and bad people even then.

And so, the debate goes on in societies when to allow death to rear it's head in their children's lives.

I can remember when my 16 year old cousin who had just got his driver's license died in a crash into a house where he broke his neck and when he turned his head to his friends to ask if they were okay, he died instantly. So, at least it was quick. I was 8 at the time and was completely traumatized by learning that my oldest cousin had died and I remember looking up at my rifle and my bullets in my bedroom and feeling scared and very alone having lost my first cousin. It's true I didn't lose my 2nd cousin until I was in my 50s around there so I had to wait at least 42 years to lose another cousin to death. But, at 8 this was the most serious thing (outside of whooping cough) I had ever dealt with in my young life then.

And so the debate regarding the deaths of relatives and friends and how children should be dealt with still goes on (even though often they are infantilized (both males and females now) until they are 30 or more depending upon the family.

So, is death of relatives and friends a potential cause of PTSD? You bet!

Is there a perfect way to deal with this? No. There is not.

Here are some poems that might help though:

And the day came
When the risk to remain
Closed tightly in a bud
Became more painful
Than the risk it took
To Blossom-             Anonymous

When inward tenderness
Finds the secret hurt,
Pain itself will crack the rock
And, Ah! Let the soul emerge
                             -Rumi

We are all of us exceedingly complex creatures and do
ourselves a service in regarding ourselves as complex.
Otherwise, we live in a dream world of nonexistent,
simplistic black and white notions which simply do
not apply to life
                                          -Theodore Rubin

These come from a college textbook of my daughter's called:
Complex PTSD: From Surviving to Thriving by Pete Walker.