How to talk to children about death, and some books that can help

At the end of a hot summer's day, the month something she knew only as 'the virus' had closed her nursery and padlocked the playgrounds, my three-year-old daughter discovered a rat in the gutter.

“That rat is dead,” she declared with an alarmingly gleeful emphasis on the word “dead”, before poking it with a twig to make sure. Then she added proudly: “That means he's not happy emy-more.”

Until that day, she'd never mentioned the D-word. And I would have thought what a beautifully simple way to interpret the meaning of existence, were I not so skewered by the existential horror of what she said next.

“Daddy?” she looked up at me, all unjaded eyes and ice-cream cheeks. “Are you going to die, like the rat?”

And the road to acceptance, she says, must start as soon as they're old enough to ask questions. "What all the research shows is that children, however young, need to know the same truth as all the adults around them," she says. "So we need to use very concrete language, like 'dead' and 'died', and follow it with a phrase that means your body doesn't work anymore, you don't feel anything and you're not coming back."

In other words, she says, don't use glossy euphemisms like 'lost', 'passed away' or 'gone to a better place' because that just leaves a gaping hole and a pile of questions. "'A better place' could be a hamburger joint, or name of a new softplay centre for all the child knows," says Samuel. "I once worked with a 12-year-old who thought his dad was in the next village because people had used words like 'gone' and 'lost'. He didn't know that meant death."

Her point is this: "What children don't know they make up. And what they make up can be much more frightening than the truth, however bad the truth may be. And often with children, they make it about them – that they did something bad and that's what has made it happen. It's their fault. After you've told them that the person has died and is not coming back, then you can add on your belief system, whether that's heaven, reincarnation or something else. But you must start with the basic truth."

The trouble is, it's hard enough to be honest with ourselves about death, let alone with our kids. It's such a vast subject to broach. At surface-level, my three-year-old knows that the ants she squishes, the small animals she sees outdoors and "naughty" cartoon characters die. But in a little mind in which days are separated by "sleeps" and "now" is the only legitimate time of day, the fact that people shuffle off – especially the ones she loves – remains a concept as distant to her as iambic pentameter.

Some other books to check out: Fred by Posy Simmonds is an uplifting tale about the comforting power of sharing sorrow and reminiscence after a pet cat dies only for his family to discover he was leading an extraordinary double life after dark. In The Cat Mummy (for slightly older kids than mine) by Jaqueline Wilson, a young girl is so sad when her beloved cat dies, she mummifies its remains and keeps it hidden in her bedroom. But when her father and grandparents discover the smelly corpse, they are inspired to finally talk about death in a way they never could when the girl's mother died several years earlier.

Finally, you can't talk about teaching kids about death without an honourable mention to Raymond Briggs' 1978 classic The Snowman, the heart-melting fantasy about a boy whose snowman magically comes to life, whisks him off on a snowy adventure and then melts into a puddle of mush and memories. And despite what Channel 4's festive cartoon adaptation would have you believe, Briggs never meant it to be about Christmas; just dear old remorseless death. "The idea was clean, nice and silent," Briggs said in 2012. "I don’t have happy endings. I create what seems natural and inevitable. The snowman melts, my parents died, animals die, flowers die. Everything does. There’s nothing particularly gloomy about it. It’s a fact of life."