How do you explain death to someone younger than three years old? Most adults are terrified by the inescapable fact that one day we cease to exist and life continues without us, so how can someone who is scared of a vacuum cleaner grasp the concept?
In March 2006, my wife, Emma, died of advanced breast cancer. She was 37. Our son and only child, Dougie, was a month short of his third birthday. In the tumult that surrounded her death, I can't remember telling him that his mum had died, though I must have done at some point. But the day after the funeral, everyone went home and left us alone. Life as a single dad had begun and I knew my son would have plenty of questions.
It was clear from the moment Emma's cancer returned, in the summer of 2005, and she became extremely sick, that Dougie could not comprehend what was happening. The dying resemble people drifting out to sea. Every now and then a wave brings them closer to shore and you catch a fleeting, cruel glimpse of their old self and you convince yourself they are improving. The next time you look, they have been washed further away, distant and lost. Dougie, quite naturally, though I know it broke his mother's heart, uncoupled himself from her and attached himself to me.
In the days and months following her death, it was the concept of dying that fascinated Dougie. I armed myself with a burgeoning stack of what can only be described as "kids death lit" – Badger's Parting Gifts (gloomy old repressed Badger is about to buy it and wastes no time telling everyone), No Matter What (not strictly about death but the immortality of maternal love) and Always and Forever (Badger's Parting Gifts rewritten by a hippy) were the recommended titles. We read them and talked about his mum.
I developed an explanation that went like this: "Mummy got sick, really sick, and the doctors couldn't make her better. When people get really sick their bodies stop working and they die. She didn't want to die, in fact she was very sad, because she wouldn't see you or Daddy again. But she did die and we won't see her again. She's not sad anymore. I'm going to miss her and it's OK for you to miss her too. But she is still in our hearts and heads. We still have pictures and memories of her. And she loved you and Daddy, and love, like starlight, never dies."
That last bit was a direct crib from No Matter What in which Big (Mummy) explains to Small (child) that even though the stars died years ago, they still shine in the sky. This image was enormously comforting for me. In fact, all the books were. After a month or so, he stopped wanting them read to him. I felt bereft. They were helping me come to terms with Emma's death too.
Each morning, he'd come in to my bed when he woke up and ask me to tell him a "Mummy story". This involved me, half awake, winging it, with some story about his mum as a little girl, often fictitious. Inevitably it segued into a discussion about death. "Mummy dying ever day," he said, and I realised he believed death was just another way of being, like being sad or happy, and the prospect was that she'd one day stop dying.
It wasn't the first time he showed his confusion. One morning he looked at me and said, "Mummy is in our hearts" – here he tapped his head – "and in our heads" – and tapped his chest. Almost as poignant as the time I was going through the drawers of our dresser when he spied one of the lurid pink hats she wore when the brain radiotherapy had made her hair fall out. "Mummy," he said, and put it on.
He then found her brown hat with the orange bobble and insisted I wore it. For an hour-long session of Lego we sat wearing her hats. It came time to go out. "I wear Mummy's hat," he said. Mummy's hat looked like a Zoom, one of those garish ice lollies that were popular in the 1970s. There was no way my three-year-old, already slightly worryingly in touch with his feminine side, was going out in that hat. "Listen," I said, "that was Mummy's hat and we don't want to lose it, it's very special. Let's keep it here, shall we?" He agreed. I muttered a silent sorry because I know Emma would have found it hilarious, yet also been cross that I was being a repressed northern killjoy perennially obsessed by the thought that someone, somewhere might be laughing at Dougie and by extension, me.
And she'd have been right.
We muddled through, him asking questions, me answering the best I could. When he was scared or hurt, or if I disciplined him and he cried, it was always "Mummy" he called for. She was the last resort, the person he wanted in his time of most need. I found it heartbreaking, but reassuring too. He was not a robot. He had not forgotten her. Like most young children, he just lived completely in the present. I think he still expected her to come through the front door one day, give him a hug and apologise for being away. That made two of us.
Sometimes the questions were difficult. I had spoken with a social worker about helping him cope with the loss. In conversation with her I decided not to mention anything about heaven. This wasn't simply because I'm an atheist. Tell a kid that his mum has gone to a "better place" and you can't fault for him wondering why she didn't take him too, and create a sense of abandonment, of not being likeable enough for the one person he loved the most to stick around, or believe that he did something wrong that made her decide to leave. So heaven could wait.
This caused a few problems with other children. A few months after his mother's death we stayed at a friend's house. They have a little boy a bit older than Dougie whose grandmother had recently died. While they played, he asked Dougie where his mum was.
"She's dead, that's where," he replied, in his matter-of-fact way.
"Is she in heaven, like my granny?"
"No," Dougie said bluntly.
Cue lots of bemused looks by my son's playmate and awkward questions to his parents about why Dougie's mum had been cast in to the pit of hell.
Of course, avoiding talk of heaven prompted the question of where she actually was. I steered clear of the truth: that her cremated remains were in a purple container beside my desk. "Well, son, we burned her and she's in that box." I don't think so.
I was aware that we had no memorial for his mother, no place we could talk about her, observe a few obsequies. Thankfully, her parents were ahead of me and assigned a tree in her memory at an arboretum, a place where we go and picnic and Dougie and his cousins can play. I know Emma would have loved it.
People often asked me how we coped. It was tough, but Dougie saved my sanity. I think, interestingly, that he might have helped me more than I helped him. Without him giving me a reason to get up in the morning, or to go to bed at a reasonable time, I think my grief might have been such that I would have crawled into the nearest whisky bottle and given up. Instead, having to feed, clothe, play and talk with my little boy gave me a purpose.
Of course, life as a single parent was demanding, though I got priceless support from my family and friends. I had to be, like many single parents, mother and father. My enthusiasm for playing Scalextric or football would wane after cooking my umpteenth bowl of cheesey pasta, or doing the washing. But we made it. Recovering from the death of someone you love is a long, gradual process. It's like a light being turned off and being plunged into sudden blackness; slowly, your eyes adjust and soon you are able to make a few things out. However, it's still bloody dark.
More than three years have passed since Emma died. We still talk about her often. Dougie seems delighted to have the same blue eyes as she had, and he has learned about the concept of heaven and has decided for himself that's where she is, which is great.
Our life has moved on. I have remarried (I met a single mum of one his friends at nursery) and he has a stepsister. Another baby is on the way. Dougie is a happy, confident little boy. A bit obsessed with death, but many young children are and it's hardly surprising given his experiences. He's been learning about reincarnation. As I tucked him into bed recently, he told me he had decided what he wanted to come back as. "What?" I asked.
He smiled. "Me."
Dan Waddell's latest novel, Blood Atonement, is published by Penguin at £7.99. More information about Dan at danwaddell.net