Not Asleep, Not Away

Never "put to sleep." Never "she went away." Never "we lost him."

Those three phrases are said every day, warmly, by kind people, and each one causes a specific, predictable problem in a child's head. Sleep becomes a place people do not come back from. Away means came back - because everybody who ever went away came back. Lost means findable, and children look.

This is a book for the parent. Not one line in it is addressed to a child.

Sixty-five short chapters on telling a child that the dog died, and on the six weeks afterwards: what to say at four, at seven, at eleven; what to do when they say nothing at all, or carry on playing, or ask if you killed him; the questions that come back in a supermarket three weeks later; the two-line message to the school; the grandparent who is about to say the wrong thing.

TWO PAGES A CHAPTER. THE SAME THREE THINGS, EVERY TIME.

- THE SITUATION, written from inside the house - the school gate, the landing, the car on the way home.

- WHAT YOU CAN SAY. Actual sentences, in quotation marks, that you can use as they are or ignore entirely.

- WHAT NOT TO SAY, with the reason. A phrase you have been told to avoid without knowing why does not survive a difficult evening.

- AND FOR YOU. One line, in all sixty-five chapters, about the fact that this was your dog as well.

BECAUSE IT WAS YOUR DOG TOO

You will explain it, absorb it, correct a grandparent, email a school, answer the same question nine times and say a plain sentence out loud to somebody who believes you can fix things. There will not be one hour this week in which your own version of it is the thing happening. The last nine chapters are about that, and it is there because it belongs in a book like this and almost never is.

NO PREDICTIONS ABOUT YOUR CHILD

Nothing here tells you how your child will react, how long anything lasts, or what any behaviour means about them. There is no checklist, no list of warning signs and no way to grade how they are doing. That is not modesty - a book cannot see your kitchen. What it gives you instead is what is common, so nothing frightens you, and the small number of things that reliably cause trouble later.

NOTHING TO SCAN. NOTHING TO DOWNLOAD.

No code, no link, no app, no companion of any kind, nothing to install and nothing waiting outside these covers. A parent reading at half past ten with the children finally asleep does not want to be told to pick up a phone.

ALSO NOT IN HERE

No stages of grief. No timetable. No statistics or studies. No claims about where he is now, in either direction - if your family has a belief, the book leaves room for it and does not touch it. No verdict on any decision made at the practice. No blaming the parent. And not one line suggesting that grief for an animal is a smaller kind of grief - least of all a child's.

Iris Waldon is not a paediatrician, not a doctor, not a psychologist, not a child development specialist, not a veterinarian and not a bereavement counsellor, and does not claim to be. There are no credentials behind this book and no research in it.