This week, doula, educator and book-lover Jade Adgate joins me to explore children’s books that delve into the tender topics of death, grief and loss. Why is it important to read about these subjects? How early can you start? And how can books guide us inward to our emotions and help us make sense of the world? Jade beautifully articulates the possibilities and meaning within life’s challenges. Whether or not you have children in your life, this episode might inspire you to seek out the seven sweet and moving titles we discuss!

• The Dead Bird – Margaret Wise Brown (Author) and ⁠Christian Robinson⁠ (Illustrator) 
• The End of Something Wonderful: A Practical Guide to a Backyard Funeral – Stephanie Lucianovic (Author) and ⁠George Ermos⁠ (Illustrator) 
• Cry Heart But Never Break – Glenn Ringtved (Author) and Charlotte Pardi (Illustrator) 
• A Last Goodbye – ⁠Elin Kelsey⁠ (Author) and ⁠Soyeon Kim⁠ (Illustrator) 
• The Rabbit Listened – by ⁠Cori Doerrfeld⁠
• The Heart and the Bottle – by ⁠Oliver Jeffers⁠
• The Truth Pixie – by Matt Haig

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Transcript:

Diane Hullet: Hi, I’m Diane Hullett, and you’re listening to the Best Life, Best Death podcast. And today I’ve got a wonderful guest that I’ve had here before. Welcome to Jade Adgate. 

Jade Adgate: Thanks, Diane. Happy to be here. 

Diane Hullet: Really, really just, I’m a big fan. Jade and I first spoke back on Best Life, Best Death, number 82 and number 83.

And at that time, we talked about a variety of books and how books are such a powerful way into the subject of death, grief, loss. These, these subjects that matter so much that are sometimes hard to get our heads around. And not just books about about explicitly death, but also books that have characters that are experiencing death that help us understand ourselves better.

So, you know, introduce yourself, tell us about the work you do, how you got into this field. 

Jade Adgate: Yeah, well, first and foremost, I am a death doula and a home funeral guide and I serve clients in the greater Nashville area. And that kind of expanded into teaching about death care to show my community what I’m so passionate about and why it’s so important.

The past year or two, I’ve been developing an apprenticeship and I’ve moved really fully into the education space. And the Farewell Library is one of the tools that I use. to offer death and grief resources for people who are looking for specific things or just to get their feet wet in death literacy and grief aware.

Reading. 

Diane Hullet: Yeah. Huge. Why, in your point of view, I mean, I just said my two sentences about why I think books matter, but why do you feel like books are an entry point for people? 

Jade Adgate: I think we need to have solid footing to start talking about tender, vulnerable things. And I think books can be one way that we let a character Whether it’s the writer from a first person perspective or an imaginary fictional character, we let them go ahead of us on the path and we can process through their lens.

And then it makes it also easier to have conversation about these big vulnerable things because the character can be the buffer or it can be the entry point. 

Diane Hullet: Yeah. Yeah. I think that makes so much sense. And again, whether. fiction or whether autobiography, there’s some way that books kind of really lead us in.

And gosh, I, you know, people ask me what I’m reading these days and I’m like, Oh, it’s always deaf books. Why, what are you reading these days? You know, that’s kind of what’s on my night’s Stan is a big pile of end of life, autobiographies and books. And I just find them endlessly interesting. I don’t know.

You know, my mom says, she says in the middle of the pandemic, or even just a couple months into the pandemic, she said, I stopped being able to read fiction because life was so much stranger and richer and complicated than any fiction plot she could read. So she kind of switched to all nonfiction. And I feel like that’s, I sort of did the same thing, but.

Nonfiction or fiction, they have their place. So I 

Jade Adgate: think I’m the opposite though, Diane. I think for me, my life is nonfiction around death and grief. That’s, that’s all of my work. And when I come home, I want to escape. And I think that I use books as kind of a side door in because even when I’m trying to read something that has.

It’s seemingly nothing to do with death. It always lands back, even in romance novels, right? I’m a huge romance lover. As a genre, I think it’s a beautiful way to explore women’s emotions. And there’s so many threads of death and grief within even the romance realm. And I think that’s why this is such a great way to start talking about death and grief is that it can be a side door.

Right? Literary works can be a side door into these conversations. We don’t have to go right on the nose all the time. 

Diane Hullet: Absolutely. Absolutely. So, so today we thought we’d talk about children’s books and we’re especially going to kind of hit on elementary age picture books. And Jade is a huge resource in this area and she’s curated some books for us.

So take it away. What do you want to tell us about first? 

Jade Adgate: Well, I think that I would like to start with why it’s so important or why I have found it to be so helpful to use books to have these conversations. I think a lot of times when we’re talking about big, heavy things, especially with our kids, we feel a little untethered and being able to literally pull your child into your lap, right?

To, to wrap them up, to have that somatic experience of kind of grounding and then to, so we’re going to use the art, both in the words and the illustrations, to be curious about some of these really hard topics. I think that is what books are doing so well for children. So a piece of it is the physical act of having that connection time, having the space.

safety of reading time. It usually happens in the bed or snuggled on the couch or together in a chair. There’s those tethers that make it feel more grounded. And then we have art, which is a really gentle place to be curious. So we have the illustrations and then the words and all of that is what creates the right environment.

So I do have a few books, and I’m trying to figure out the best place to start. I’ve got some that I love. I have some classics. I have some for the youngest readers. Maybe that’s a organic, like a intuitive place to start. Because that’s really hard when you have children who are barely verbal, and they are Experiencing loss in some profound way, we’re looking for ways to have conversation that’s age appropriate without overwhelming them or scaring them.

And books serve this function beautifully. One book that is a classic in this space is Margaret Wise Brown’s The Dead Bird. And I think what this book does so perfectly is it uses the word dead. Even in the title, and we know that with children, it’s hard to use that word, but it’s almost essential, right, when we’re teaching about this.

So this is one that has the bright colors, primary colors, that are perfect for little children. Very simple language, very gentle, and even if you’re just reading the words and letting them ask the questions that flow from there, we can just start with the, the youngest children with a book like that.

Diane Hullet: Beautiful. I, I, her illustrations are so simple and the concept is so big that I can imagine that’s a really good match and the dead bird is often a way that children first experienced death, a dead bird, a dead animal on the road. These, these show up and they say, what is this? Why isn’t it moving? Why is it sleeping?

Jade Adgate: And it’s such a beautiful way to start talking about our people is with nature, with animals. And that leads me to one of my favorite children’s book writers, Stephanie Lucianovic. She has a gorgeous book called The End of Something Wonderful, a practical guide to backyard funerals. And so she wrote this book because her kids had to do a backyard funeral and so many questions were coming up and she could not ignore how profound of a metaphor this was for what was going to come as they had to bury family.

And so she wrote a little tender book about how we honor a life. and how we can bury it. And it also serves really great for families that are interested in having some type of home funeral, which is having a movement, having a moment right now in the holistic death care world to be able to explain this kind of big idea, why we’re taking death and bringing it back home instead of using a funeral home.

I think this book builds a really natural bridge between those two ideas. 

Diane Hullet: And when you say it’s having a backyard funeral for a pet, for a person, what’s the, 

Jade Adgate: who’s that? So she does all kinds of things. In the book, it’s the ideal is yes, the pet. And so they bury a goldfish, but they also imagine that this would be the same for any type of animal.

And they start picturing even burying a dinosaur, how big of a grave they would have to dig. And they’re talking through, what do you bury? Why do we bury? What is the experience of burying? What do we hope as we bury? How do we honor the burial? And it’s all done very gently and beautifully. 

Diane Hullet: Wow. This is so taking me back.

I’m, I’m picturing rabbits that I buried as a child and Guinea pigs that I buried as a child and how you know, how my mom primarily. Held that or, or, or move through it quickly. Cause she was a very you know, gardener nature based person. She’s like, all right, let’s get this thing in the ground. But there was this sense of the sacred and the sense of the ending.

Yeah. Yeah. 

Jade Adgate: I mean, as we’re talking about books and how supportive they are to children as they learn to process these really big abstract ideas, and the same way I think is really supportive to parents, because we’re looking for ways to broach these conversations. And if we are reading books like this, maybe it’s not something we read every night, but right, something that’s in our library, then when we do have the bigger, the more powerful moments, when it’s grandma or uncle or family friend, you have this tether of remember when Remember when we read the book about burying the goldfish, or remember when we talked about burying our pet, or when we practiced this and we buried the rabbit, right?

It gives us kind of these gentle entry points. 

Diane Hullet: Yes, I remember my kids read a book when one of our dear friends had cancer. There was a book called When Eric’s Mom Got Cancer. And again, using the word, naming it, talking about what that experience was like. And they would request that book over and over again because I think they were processing what was happening for this friend.

And I had sort of stumbled on this book at a used bookstore and happened to have it on my bookshelf. And then when it became relevant to their lives, they went for that book. 

Jade Adgate: And how beautiful of a resource is that for them? Because then you can kind of keep a finger on how they’re processing and when they’re turning back to it and which parts are they stumbling on and which are integrating really easily.

It’s just such a helpful information gathering tool to have books like this in your library. And many of them are really beautiful, too. I think that’s something that when I look at some of the earlier books about death and grief, the one that’s coming to mind is the one about dinosaurs. Oh, I’ll have to think of the name of it, but they, they was more cartoon style, kind of 80s.

It looks like something we would have watched on 80s. And the messaging is beautiful. But now I think we’re taking these illustrators that are creating gorgeous works of art into these books. A really good example of that is Cry Heart But Never Break. This book, my husband bought it for our kids when they were really young, and at first I was like, this is great.

Weird. It’s kind of Scandinavian in the illustration style. It’s a little stark and artsy. But Death in this book is portrayed as a friend. And so Death comes for the grandmother. But Death is not this scary Grim Reaper figure. It’s an elderly person with these soft blue eyes, and she has to come for the friend because that’s how the cycle works.

And so she talks to the grandchildren, and she says, I have to take your grandmother now, but she’s this warm and friendly character. Not completely friendly, but enough to where it’s not such a scary image, I think is how we see, you know, in the media about death and the art in it is just, it’s gorgeous and it’s different than what kids are used to seeing.

So they, it really caught my kids attention. It was one of the books that they pulled off the shelf a lot, I think, because it was so different than what we usually offer kids pastel and vibrant and bright. And that in itself is a beautiful conversation to bring some curiosity to with your kid. Why is it described this way?

Why is it painted this way? Do you like the way that this is painted? Does it make you feel fear or open? Like what’s, what, how are you experiencing this art? 

Diane Hullet: So interesting, because mostly in the U. S. culture, death would be depicted in things like around Halloween, right? Like the Grim Reaper is kind of how we picture death, or skeletons, or it’s often this kind of much more frightening sort of images, I think, to kids or, or skeletons and black and dark and Halloween and purple or zombies, right?

But so to say, what if death is a friend? What if death is a blue eyed, kind friend who’s coming that, that really opens up the door for kids and for parents to think about how to frame this differently. 

Jade Adgate: Yeah, exactly. I think so too. And like for us. Right? Like how, how do we know death just as adults that have to build relationships with death throughout life?

How are we picturing her? Is it this grim reaper with a scythe? Who is a figure out of a horror film or is it something gentle and familiar who we’ve crossed paths with many times? Yeah. This is the stuff that I think, you know, a lot of times when we’re reading children’s books, we kind of are picking up things that we think will be relevant to our children and helpful to them.

And that is true. But so many of these books can live on my coffee table because they are very short, precise books, right? With beautiful art. So what better thing to have as a conversation starter on your coffee table? 

Diane Hullet: Oh, I couldn’t agree more. I think that’s a really neat idea. So far, everyone you’ve, you’ve mentioned, I’m thinking I have to go order.

Jade Adgate: Okay, well, there’s one that’s really cool. This book is called A Last Goodbye. It’s by Elin Kelsey. And I love this book because it’s nonfiction. And there’s not a lot of nonfiction for kids that’s death and grief relevant. And this is about how animals, process death. So as much as I guess we can gather, but it talks about how different species of animals see death happen and then how they grieve.

And there’s something that’s so humanizing to think about the fact that we are animals and that there’s something that is so universal about this experience and that maybe much of the fear And the horror that we were just talking about is what humans have put on a very natural process. And so finding comfort in the way that animals all across the earth go through this too, right?

I think it really helps kids to feel a sense of ease when we’re having these conversations. 

Diane Hullet: Beautiful. Can you, are there examples that come to 

Jade Adgate: mind for you from the book of what animals do? I believe that there are Is it the orca? There’s a, I remember being really impressed by quite a few of the animals.

I believe it’s the orca that grieves for a long time. There’s also polar bears. There’s primates, all kinds of animals in the book. And everyone’s process is a little bit different. I can’t quite remember all of them. But I remember feeling surprised by how deeply elephants was one that surprised me in the book.

How deeply these animals connect, especially to their to their young, to their offspring, and how long and lengthy the grief process can be. And I remember as I was reading this book, and this one I found at my local library. So this is not an obscure book to find, which is really great. But I remember as I was reading it, thinking, gosh, we expect humans to get through their grief so fast and get right back into productivity.

But what are we learning from animals here? Right? Like maybe that’s just not the way this works. 

Diane Hullet: And how they take time, they take their natural time. I remember reading just recently in the news about a female orca who’s been carrying a dead baby. And they keep spotting her and the baby’s on her back.

And what that would take as a creature of the sea to keep this dead baby on your back. I mean, the minute you dive, it would float off. So, or maybe it floats off and she comes back up underneath it, but it’s been, I feel like it’s been months that she’s been carrying this baby. 

Jade Adgate: That feels right. And primates, too.

I was watching the Netflix documentary. Is it Chimp Empire? The one that, I think it’s about chimps. And the mother carried the body of her dead chimp baby for days. And so when you think about how few tools they have, right, to feed themselves, to care for themselves, to give up one of your arms to climb through the trees, it’s a real labor.

But it took her time to be ready. to lay down that body. It wasn’t something that happened as soon as death happened. And I think that’s such a beautiful lesson to us about some of the disconnect between our modern approach at death and what we are feeling intuitively and instinctively. And of course, animals are such a good reminder of that.

Diane Hullet: Yeah. And what would it mean to take a little time? And I always remind people. You know, that doesn’t mean you’re necessarily, you know, one extreme would be you’re keeping the body for 10 days on dry ice. Another extreme would be the mortuary people come and pick the body up in 30 minutes. There’s something in between that might intuitively speak to the part of you that needs to spend time with the body of a loved one.

Jade Adgate: I think that’s exactly right. Okay. And that leads me to the next book because I was hired by a family to help them keep their daughter’s body at home after death. They wanted to have the body at home from death to burial. The idea of sending her five year old body to a funeral home just felt Like something they were not wanting to take on.

And when I was working with this family, the little girl who died was four and she had two little sisters. And so we used books a lot to talk with the little girls and with the girl who was dying about what was happening. And it was such a beautiful entry point. And. The little girl who died, her name was Adeline, she told me that her favorite book about grief is called The Rabbit Listened.

And she told me the reason that she loved this book is that it was the only book that showed people how she wanted to be loved. So, a lot of people, a lot of her friends, a lot of her parents friends, a lot of family members wanted to offer words of support, wanted to help, wanted to be a source of inspiration for her, of momentum, and nothing was really landing.

And so this book, The Rabbit Listened, was what she wanted people to know about approaching her and what would truly serve her. And the whole point of the book is that people just need to listen. There’s nothing that you can say to make this better, but if you truly listen with your heart open, that is helping.

Diane Hullet: Whoa, what a story. How beautiful that at five years old she knew. She knew what would help her and that the book could reflect that and then she could say, this is it, this, read this, this is what I want. 

Jade Adgate: And this is another, a really powerful story of books, right? Sometimes they offer the words that we don’t quite have for our experience.

They can almost be friends in that sense, that they, we find them when we need them, and they can speak for us until we have our own language. 

Diane Hullet: Oh, those two sentences, that just nailed it. They speak for us, they help us find the words, and they give us some language. 

Jade Adgate: And that leads me to a couple of books that are not specifically written about death or grief but I think give us more of an abstract language.

So the first one that’s coming to mind is the Oliver Jeffers book, The Heart in the Bottle. So this book, I don’t know if you’d find it on the grief shelf. I think that the idea is that a little boy has a person in his life who, cultivates the curiosity, helps them find the wonder, and then that person disappears.

And so in the book, we don’t really go into why, which of course it could be death, but it could be a lot of things. And so the child has to figure out where is he going to go to continue cultivating that sense of wonder and that imagination and creativity? Is he going to bottle it up and protect it so that he’s no longer vulnerable?

Or is there another way? And I think that’s a It can speak beautifully for death, it can speak beautifully for grief, and it can also be something a little bit more abstract. So if you don’t have kids that are imminently processing death and grief, but you want to start introducing these concepts, think a book like this one with incredible art.

I mean, really, this is one that’s a bright color, and it’s just got that vivid art that we think of being so appropriate for kids. This is a really beautiful entry point. 

Diane Hullet: Fabulous. What’s the next one? 

Jade Adgate: So this is the last book that I wrote down. This one is Matt Haig. So Matt Haig is known for writing things that are very grief relevant.

All of his books for adults skirt or address grief in some way. And he has a book for children. It’s a long children’s book. So it’s like the length of a chapter book, but it is written for children and every page is illustrated. And it’s called The Truth Pixie. And the idea is that there is a fairy who can, her gift is that she can only tell the truth.

And you can imagine all the complications that this would cause for a fairy. We don’t always live in a world that’s super open to hearing the truth at all times. And especially the truth when we’re talking about things like death and grief. But there’s parts of this book that speak so beautifully to the experience of death and grief for kids.

I have a little quote here. There will be people you love, who can’t stay forever. And there will be things you can’t fix, although you are clever. But listen hard and listen good. Life might not go as it should, but you are young and your life will be magic. It will be happy and funny and sometimes tragic.

And that is what Matt Haig, I think, does so well, is he doesn’t shy away from looking at things honestly, and he can somehow help us find the beauty in the tragic. 

Diane Hullet: Fantastic, Jade. Oh, these six books you’ve gone through. Each have such a unique quality and each have such a place in a child’s experience of, of life, life, you know, which includes death and loss.

I appreciate how you’ve, you know, shared these and the arc of what they create because that last one is clearly for older kids. And I think we have a whole other podcast in us about the next level of books, which is like middle school, high school. There’s so much being written right now for that. Experience, if you will, that though, not, I wouldn’t call it a genre exactly, but the experience of death and loss.

I think people have come to realize it’s so important to talk about it with kids and with middle school kids. I mean, with suicide of this kind of age at these epidemic proportions, we have to address difficulty and loss and hardship now. 

Jade Adgate: I think you’re absolutely right. And I think books are a beautiful tether into that.

I think we’re a little scared to talk to our kids about these heavy things, but it’s almost like there’s a window that’s open and we’re on the second floor and we’re trying to just avoid the window. But maybe we could just talk to the kids about what it means to have this open window. And how we can protect ourselves from falling out of the window instead of just trying to avoid it completely.

And I think that the books that we’re seeing being published right now are really informative for us as parents, too. If we are looking at the books that are currently being released on death and grief for younger children, that kind of gives us an idea of what our kids can process, what words are suitable for them, how deep they can go into that understanding.

Also, like where the. And then if you’re looking at just the literature that’s being published for each of these age groups, you can see how the human brain can comprehend at greater depths and greater breadth, these really big concepts. And I think those middle grade novels are really fun and that they’re bringing in imaginary people.

So we’re letting kids imagine all the different ways that death can look and celebrating that instead of trying to shame and avoid and deny it, right? And that’s such a cool entry point into conversation with kids from, from every standpoint. 

Diane Hullet: Fantastic. Well, I appreciate you so much, Jade. How can people find out more about the work you do?

Jade Adgate: Well, you’re welcome to head over to Farewell Library on Instagram. That’s where I keep an up to date listing of the book reviews that I am publishing. You can also find out more at Farewell Education. And of course, I have a podcast too, the Bevival Exit Interview Podcast, where I interview authors who are writing about death and grief for the modern age.

Diane Hullet: Fantastic. Thank you so much, Jade. You’ve been listening to the Best Life Best Death podcast. I’m Diane Hullett and you can find out more about me at Best life. Best death.com. Thanks for listening.