Intimations of Mortality

Some say that modern Americans don't deal well with death and dying. We avoid the subject, they say, and do our best to deny that it will come.

In an earlier time, death was an immanent reality, appearing in children's fairy tales, in childhood prayers, in ghost stories.

When I was three years old, I learned to say my prayers every night as follows:

"Now I lay me down to sleep;
I pray the Lord my soul to keep;
If I should die before I wake;
I pray the Lord my soul to take."

When you think about it, it's a pretty gruesome prayer. It taught children that death might be at hand at any time.

And think about traditional fairy tales. How many featured a wicked stepmother? Cinderella, Snow White, Hansel and Gretel and many others. Remember the Miller's beautiful daughter who had to spin straw into gold in the story of Rumpelstiltskin? Where was her mother? She was apparently deceased.

There are also stories in which the father is absent and the mother is widowed. Jack and the beanstalk, for example.

Not only do these stories deal with death, they deal with danger and peril.

Do we still tell such stories to children?

We should.