ROOM AT THE BEDSIDE

Somewhere in the house, a child has noticed that the adults are different now and has not been told why.

When someone is dying, a family makes a decision in a hallway: what do we tell the children? It is almost always made out of love. It is almost always made wrong.

Room at the Bedside begins where other books on children's grief end, before the death. It is written for the parent, grandparent, or caregiver holding it at eleven at night, with a conversation that cannot wait until morning and no time to read a book.

Inside you will find:

• Word-for-word scripts for every age, from three years old to seventeen, written to be read aloud almost verbatim if that is what you need.
• An honest walkthrough of the room. The hospital bed, the humming oxygen machine, the changed face, the irregular breathing, the smell nobody warns you about, so you can prepare a child for exactly what they will see.
• How to decide whether a child should visit, what job to give them at the bedside, and what to do when they say no.
• What to say in the first sixty seconds, and honest answers to the questions children really ask. Will it hurt? Did I cause it? Are you going to die too?
• What the last days actually look like, in plain language you can translate for a child, including why a dying person stops eating, and which sounds are not suffering.
• How to tell ordinary grief from something that needs help, and where to find free support that almost no family knows exists.

Written by a hospice and palliative care nurse practitioner, this is a practical, unsentimental guide that refuses to use soft words for hard things, because children can always tell when an adult is doing one thing with their face and another with their words.

For parents, grandparents, kinship and foster carers, teachers, school counselors, chaplains, funeral professionals, and hospice teams.

One in eleven American children will experience the death of a parent or sibling before the age of eighteen. Very few of them are prepared for it. This book is for the adult who wants to do better than silence.