Kids Meet a Mortician and Talk About Death

Talking about death is difficult, even when the conversation is between two adults. And most of us find it nearly impossible to talk about death to kids. Even though we know that demystifying something scary is the best way to obviate fear, talking to children about the subject of death is something people in our culture almost never do. And that’s very unfortunate, because it leaves our young people woefully ill-equipped to deal with death when it happens to someone close to them.

Nora Menkin talks to Atlas and Oscar about death
Credit: HiHo Kids

Now Nora Menkin and the YouTube channel HiHo Kids have done something to help change that. The managing funeral director at the Co-op Funeral Home of People’s Memorial in Seattle, Washington, Nora recently sat down with a few school age children to talk about death, dying, funerals, and what happens to our bodies after we die. HiHo Kids filmed the segment, Kids Meet a Mortician”  for its video series, “Kids Meet.”

A rather unlikely looking funeral director, Nora is young, fresh faced, and relaxed. As she talks to the children, either singly or in twos, she laughs often and easily, and is calmly supportive when the kids express their discomfort with some of the “messier” aspects of death. She explains decomposition, cremation, and even the relatively new method of disposition known as alkaline hydrolysis, (she calls it aquamation) and answers the children’s questions in age-appropriate language they can easily understand.

The children, too, are amazingly relaxed during the conversations, even as they express their astonishment at some of the information Nora conveys. Two young boys, Oscar and Atlas, for example, seem horrified when they learn that decomposing bodies eventually turn into “dirt” (“I’m never touching dirt again!” Oscar exclaims.) And one young girl is pretty put off by the idea of bugs crawling on us after we die. But Nora explains calmly that this is just the cycle of life, and the little girl seems quite content to accept that fact.

Credit: HiHo Kids

The question and answer session is sometimes funny, sometimes quirky, and sometimes very serious. Towards the middle of the video, one girl asks Nora, “How do you want to die?” Nora answers that she hopes to die quietly in her sleep someday, then asks the little girl, “How about you?” The child doesn’t answer, and when Nora asks her if she’s ever thought about dying she looks perplexed and a little sad as she says, “No.”

Then there’s a young boy whose grandfather had recently died. When Nora asks him if he thinks death is “kinda creepy,” his response is surprisingly articulate. “Yes, I’m, quite frankly, terrified…just because everything just stops and, as far as we know, you never have another time to be alive,” he says. That’s a pretty profound statement from a child of about 10, and one that shows us very clearly why it’s so important to allow children to express their feelings after the death of someone they love. One has to wonder if this boy’s parents knew how afraid he was.

“Kids Meet a Mortician” is only 6 ½ minutes long, but it packs a lot of information into that short span of time. If you’re a parent whose not quite sure how to talk about death with your school-age child, check out the video below. You may also want to view some of the other Kids Meet segments, including Kids Meet a 101 Year Old, and Kids Meet a Kid with Cancer.