explaining death
Niels Olson
at 2:45 am to her seizing in bed. By the time we had the urgent care
vet on the phone, she was responding to voice and walking, albiet
groggily. Talking with the vet, we decided to wait and see. Sure
enough Lily had another grand mal seizure within the hour and my wife
took her in. Her blood sugar was normal (eg, this was not
hypoglycemia) and the decision was made to euthanize her. At that
point, she'd had 4 seizures in less than 2 hours.
I stayed home with the kids, and when my wife got back, one of the
things we talked about was how to tell the kids. In that discussion,
one question was whether we should have woken them up, so they could
understand exactly why we did what we did. Quite frankly, in the
moment, at 3 am, waking up the kids wasn't on the agenda. We were just
trying to get through situation. But had we paternally excluded them
from an important experience? My position in the conversation was,
well, yes, we had, but to me it seemed that was outweighed by the
cruelty of waking a kid up for no other reason that to witness
suffering.
As a physician, I feel like bearing witness is a sacred trust, and
there's real learning there. There's some higher level learning, but
the heavy lifting is on the right side of the brain: understanding,
perception, training the part of the mind that understands art. And I
reject the argument that kids aren't ready for it. They're smart. They
get it. And the earlier people integrate that understanding into their
being, the better, IMHO. But we didn't do that. Would I do things
differently? I don't know. But I wish I had thought of it at the time.
Submitted for your consideration.
Jem
woke me up at something like 2am to tell me... show me his mangled,
lifeless body. These days all I remember of my cat was his dead body,
eye hanging out the eye socket, bloody tangled fur.
I would rather have missed that "opportunity", personally. Perhaps,
though, it was the state of him, rather than the fact that he was dead.
Stephen Haberman
Eh, I dunno. Depends on how old your kids are.
Kids being smart doesn't automatically mean they can handle
emotions in the same way as a mature adult.
As an example, I remember aspects of childhood that freaked me out
(scary movies, specifically). Now I can laugh and say "haha, yeah,
that's not real," but, at the time, even despite "knowing" it's not
real, something about my emotional immaturity made them hard to
deal with. Overactive imagination or something, where I'd be disturbed
by them for days/weeks afterwards.
I could see watching the family dog suffer be the same sort of
emotional experience that, as an adult, doesn't seem like a big deal,
but could really effect and stay with a kid.
Granted, they will witness/experience suffering eventually, but I
wouldn't have any reservations about sparing them that until they were,
oh, say, young teenagers.
In your situation, I think you did the right thing, and I would be
fine telling my young (4-6yo) kids the truth, describing the seizures,
how the dog was suffering, etc. As I think they could definitely handle
hearing and thinking about it, just outside of the emotional situation
of watching it actually happen.
- Stephen
