Books at Bedtime: feeling sad…
Whenever there is something to be explained to small people, I usually turn to books. Having the right book to broach subjects like sadness and grief can be a godsend. Michael Rosen’s Sad Book is one of those, though I would advise a solitary reading before sitting down with the children, as its understated language, poetry really, is overwhelmingly emotive. As Rosen explained in an interview, he wrote the book following the death of his eighteen-year-old son Eddie. During school visits, children used to ask him what became of Eddie, following his appearances in previous books.
“When I said, ‘He’s dead,’ you’d see the kids just nodding, ‘Oh, right, that’s what happened, is it?’ Very matter of fact.” Which may be how Rosen had the sense that children could handle the material in his Sad Book, a book that, quite simply, makes sense of sadness.
Quentin Blake’s illustrations are integral to conveying the depths of emotion and actually draw children in to the meaning by offering scenarios which may touch parallels with their own lives. Rosen is not coming up with easy, pat answers. His grief will never go away – but he does talk about how he deals with it and the small but effective ways he can be kind to himself that mean the grief is not allowed to take over his whole life. It’s not a book to be picked up lightly but it offers a chance to reflect and can help children realise they don’t have to be isolated when they are feeling deeply sad.
October 20th, 2007 at 1:36 am
Another sensitive book on death, a favorite since it was first published in 1983, is “Beginnings and Endings with Lifetimes in between,” written and illustrated by Australians Bryan Mellonie and Robert Ingpen, respectively. Ingpen’s drawings tell the simple austere truth of the text: that all creatures, including humans, “have their lifetimes.” “So, no matter how long they are, or how short, lifetimes are really all the same.”