angel play

We have not directly discussed my mom's dying with our kids. We are waiting for them to ask about it, and they have not.

Nonetheless, about a week after Christmas I heard Maggie in the living room making crying sounds. When she does this I have to cock my head and listen carefully to tell whether it is real crying or fake crying. In this case it was fake crying, so I peeked around the corner to see what was going on. I saw that she was playing with three small figures on the couch. Two of the figures were angels from different nativity scenes, and one was a tiny fairy that came with her Fairy Barbie.

The largest angel was the grandma, the smaller angel was the mom and the tiny fairy was the girl. The mom and girl were crying and crying because grandma had died and they were so sad! Their crying seemed endless and they had no words for their grief. After about 7 minutes of this, the girl-fairy suddenly got an idea. "Hey!", she said to her mom, "let's bring grandma back to life!". The mom-angel agreed that this was a great idea, and Frankie got distracted from his train set and asked if he could play too. So together the mom-angel, the girl-fairy and Thomas the Tank Engine's AAA battery all made contact with the grandma-angel's body. Her resurrection was swift, and there was much celebrating afterward. And then they got try out their new craft on all the toy creatures in their toybins.