Two Books for Kids to Process Death

One of my former students asked me if I had a book rec for a child who’d lost a beloved bunny rabbit. Her daughter, I gathered, was struggling with a lot of big feelings, including anger with God.

I’ve witnessed those big feelings firsthand when our own beloved rabbit, Basil, was devoured by an owl—a friendly owl, mind you, but an owl all the same, with owl-like appetites—and our own daughter, Blythe, eight years old at the time, felt devastated by that loss.

I did a little rummaging around, bought a few books, read them through, and can now heartily recommend these two books: The Rabbit Listened by Cori Doerrfeld, and All Will Be Well by Lacy Finn Borgo.

Both these books ground the process of grief in physical experiences: one in a rabbit who simply remains physically present to a grieving child and the other who holds a hazelnut in her hand as a reminder of Julian of Norwich’s saying that if something as small as a hazelnut is loved by God, then we too, surely, are loved by God. They’re both heartbreakingly good books.

I devote an entire section in my new book with Phaedra, Prayers for the Pilgrimage, to prayers for Joy and Sorrow, in addition to a section for prayers “For Birth to Death.” One of the prayers is titled “For an Untimely Death,” another “For the Fear of Death,” another “For Anger,” another “For Sadness.”

But I also have a batch of “Nature” prayers, and on the request of our dear friends, I wrote a prayer “For Pets.” It was a really fun prayer to write in light of the fact that we have two guinea pigs of our own, one named Prudence, the other Peppermint.

This batch likewise includes a prayer “For the Feast of St. Francis,” on which we celebrate all God’s creatures, great and small, from the creepy-crawlies to the birds of the air, the beasts of the field, and the fish of the sea. (They’re all A Rocha-inspired prayers in some fashion.)

My hope is that these prayers provide both joy in our experience of our beloved animals but also a vehicle for necessary grief when we lose these same beloved animals, because, in certain cases, it really does feel like the end of the world, Lord help us.❤️‍🩹💔🐰🐇