Making a Book About Someone Who Has Died

There is a particular kind of grief that belongs to families with young children. Someone dies, and alongside everything else there is a quieter worry: the youngest ones will not remember them. The two-year-old will have no memories at all. The baby will only ever know a name and a face in photographs.

Writing the story down is one of the few things that genuinely helps with that. This is a practical guide to doing it.

Start with the ordinary things

The instinct is to record the big facts: where they were born, what they did for a living, when they married. Those matter, but they are usually the parts that survive anyway, in documents and other people’s memories.

What disappears fastest is texture. How they answered the phone. What they always said when they were annoyed. The particular way they cut an apple. Whether they were early or always slightly late. These are the details that make a person recognisable to a child who never met them, and almost nobody writes them down.

• What did their hands look like?
• What did the house smell like?
• What did they say when they answered the phone?
• What did they always have in their pockets, or their handbag?
• What made them laugh so hard they could not speak?
• What were they doing when they seemed most themselves?

Gather it from more than one person

Everyone holds a different version. A sibling remembers a different person than a child does; a friend remembers someone neither of them ever met. If more than one person is willing to contribute, ask them the same handful of questions separately. The overlaps tell you what was truly characteristic, and the differences are often the most interesting part.

Decide what the children get

This is the hardest editorial decision, and it is worth making deliberately rather than by default.

Research from Emory University found that children who know more about their family history — including its difficult chapters — showed better outcomes on several measures than children who did not. The families whose children coped best were not those with the smoothest stories. They were the ones who talked about hard things clearly, including how the family came through them.

Applied to a book about someone who has died, that suggests a middle path between two instincts that both feel protective:

• Do include that the person is gone. A book that pretends otherwise becomes unusable the moment the child understands, and children generally know more than adults assume.
• Do include hard things they lived through, named simply, with the feeling attached and with whoever helped them.
• Leave out detail that serves no purpose for a child. The manner of a death, medical specifics, family conflict. Depth is not the same as completeness.
• Do end somewhere. An unresolved hard story is the one that frightens. The resolution does not have to be happy, but it has to exist.

Write it as though they were speaking, or don’t — but choose

Books about someone who has died tend to work in one of two voices, and mixing them is what makes a draft feel wrong.

Their voice — the person telling their own story to the child. This is warmer and works well for young children, but some families find it uncomfortable, and that discomfort is worth respecting.

Your voice — you telling the child about them. This creates a little distance, which can be exactly what a family needs, and lets you say “he died before you were born, and here is who he was.”

Neither is more correct. Pick one before you start.

Let it be unfinished

Nobody manages to include everything, and trying to is the most common reason these projects stall. A short book that exists is worth far more than a complete one that never gets made.

A note on doing this with children

Older children often want to help — choosing which stories go in, remembering details adults have forgotten. That participation can be valuable. Follow their lead, and let them stop when they want to stop. This is meant to be a way of keeping someone close, not an assignment.