Dealing with death.

Watching the end of the BBC TV series Robin Hood has led me to wonder about how death is approached in literature for children, and thereby in education. This is also at a time when there have been high profile celebrity deaths that created a degree of public emotionalism. In Robin Hood, Robin is wounded by a poisoned dagger which allows him a protracted and reflective death. As he eventually dies, his dead wife Marion comes to fetch him and leads him by the hand into "an even greater adventure". As they walk off screen, his body slumps. His death loses gravity. The act of murder has released him into a better world, reunited him with his heart's desire. His death is implicitly condoned.

What do children think of death, and what do we tell them when a loved one dies? Today's gun and knife culture may encourage some children to kill: could their mental model of death encourage them to depict death as a good thing, and remove a sense of guilt?

Death is becoming a common theme in writing for children. Philip Pullman's His Dark Materials is littered with child and adult deaths, and includes a visit to Hades, whose bounds were broken allowing the shades freedom in a celestial melting pot or nirvana. Part of his purpose was to remove the fear of hell and project a picture of a blissfully happy afterlife modeled on Friends Reunited.

Garth Nix has made a career writing about death in curious ways. His Abhorsen fantasy trilogy is about necromancy, the dead returning, people entering death and sometimes escaping from it. Death is greatly to be feared, and mixed up with magic and destruction. His Keys of the Kingdom cycle have a young asthmatic boy, Arthur on the point of death during a cross-country run, being taken into a fantasy house where he in declared heir and wins the keys of power which will enable him to gain control of time by removing the upstart despots who rule each day. The house is like an afterlife, in which the basic function is archiving people's lives and actions. So a companion, Turquoise Blue (from the colour of the ink) had died of black death in the middle ages. The last volume, Lord Sunday, does not appear until the new year, so we must wait to see how it all resolves, and whether the seven books have only been a dream.

Michelle Paver's six volume Chronicles of Ancient Darkness (starting with Wolf Boy, 2003) charts the life of two young people, Torak and Renn. The setting is the stone age north, where totem tribes were hunter gatherers. This was the pre-scientific world of magic, shamans ('Mages'), spirits and demons. The voice-over narrator assumes these beliefs. Torak is the world's redeemer, with special powers, but is otherwise just a vulnerable lad. Renn also has special powers, and superb personal qualities, which she uses to support, protect and manage Torak. Wolf, a real wolf, is pack brother to both of them. The world is, Tolkein style, threatened by a magic stone than needs destroying, against the greed for power of rogue Mages, the Soul Eaters. This is a world where people live by hunting, showing respect for the lives they are taking and other flora and fauna. In death, the three souls leave the body, and provided the right rituals take place, keep together. They can however be harnessed for evil means, such as made to possess animals or children. The death of anything, even for food, and even plants, is not taken lightly. However, when declared an outcast, anyone who encountered him was supposed to kill him, and killing people or animals who threaten clan security is sanctioned - usually these are declared possessed of evil. Torak, Renn and all other young people carry weapons routinely for their own safety, usually made safe by clan custom. For child readers, there are questions about the nature of the soul or souls (the eternal spiritual entity that resides within our body, and about how we should view life and death in daily life.

There are two views of death currently at odds - that our inner self will survive death and move to some other sphere, disembodied; and that our inner self is simply the accumulations of feeling and knowledge which, on death, is simply switched off and ends. Logically, what holds for a human should also hold for a dog, cow or slug, and a slug heaven is rather difficult to imagine. Religions have promoted belief in an afterlife, emphasizing the need for reward or punishment. Hinduism is more open, recognising the mystery and relegating reward and punishment to our future embodied lives. Today, the autonomous self is promoted, with self esteem, self respect and an expectation for self empowerment. That this self has an eternal future is viewed as self evident. Modern spiritualities have replaced the efforts of traditional religions, although they borrow angels, demons and other conceptual paraphernalia.

This leaves us a quite serious question, what do we teach our children about death? Given the popular media and the stories they read, they cannot be very clear.