Jan 02 2009
A Bump in Life’s Road
I finally have gotten to the point that I am ready to talk, or in this case, write about what I and my family went through when the Big “C” came into our lives. I would like to share how my family, (myself, husband David, and two teens), dealt with the initial shock of hearing that Marilynn, David’s mother, had lung cancer.
It was 2002. Brandon, our son was 12, and Casey, our daughter was 10. Their Grandma was just diagnosed with lung cancer. This was the first fatal illness in the family, and both kids were close to their grandma. How do you tell your young children what is going on? How much should you tell them?
We chose to tell them exactly what was going on. We would spend time searching for information on health sites on the Internet to get as much information as we could about the disease, the treatments, and the life expectancy, (which was not good). We sat the kids down one night, and talked with them. We gave them all the information that we knew, the possible effects that treatment would have on Marilynn, and what the most likely outcome would be. At first the kids kept saying that they didn’t want grandma to die. We stressed that everyone dies at sometime. We told them that this body that we have, that we use and see others in, is only a shell that houses our essence, and that this body, this hull, is only usable for a specific amount of time. At the end of that time, the “body” must die. But we did tell them that we felt her essence would not be dead, but moved on to the next plane of existence; what ever that might be.
I have always felt that parents should be honest with their kids. Kids, of any age, need to feel that their parents can be trusted, can be counted on to give them straight forward answers to their questions. As parents, we need to take the time to put the important information into the terminology that is suitable for their child’s education level, but we owe it to them, and ourselves, to be up front with them.
