Grief, Through a Child’s Eyes
We can’t control what we lose, only how we move forward.
We had a dog. Her name was Ophelia, but for reasons only he understood, my son called her "Preesa." She was already old when he was born, and by the time he turned two, she moved slower, rested more. This past July, when her pain became too much and she could barely walk, we made the difficult decision to let her go.
At first, my son didn’t understand. We told him Ophelia—Preesa—had died and wouldn’t be coming back. He nodded, listened, and moved on as if nothing had changed. But for days, he still expected to see her.
"Daddy, where’s Preesa?"
"She’s gone, buddy. She died."
"But where is her?"
A week later, he told his daycare teachers, unprompted, that his puppy had died. Then he started telling anyone who would listen—his grandparents, strangers at the grocery store. He wasn’t sad, exactly. Just matter-of-fact. As if saying it aloud helped him make sense of it.
A few weeks later, he invented an imaginary dog. He called it "Krooper." Krooper wasn’t always around, but sometimes my son would hold out his palm and ask us to pet the dog. At times, he was the dog. He was filling the space Ophelia left—a space he hadn’t known existed, a space so many of us struggle to close.
Grief moves in ways we don’t expect. We like to believe we understand it, but even as adults, we never know when it will hit us, what will trigger it, or how long it will linger. Children are no different.
They process loss in their own time. My son reacted gradually. We did our best to hold his hand through it, but he learned about death only a day or two after I tried explaining why he couldn’t see his hair growing. When you have less context for how the world works, you have less ability to explain things away. No lockboxes in the mind to compartmentalize the hard truths.
Next month, we’re bringing home a new puppy. I imagine he’ll call it Krooper.
Loss finds us all, but so does renewal. We can’t control what we lose—only how we make sense of it and move forward. My son, in his own way, has been learning that truth. He isn’t forgetting—he’s adapting. He speaks, remembers, and reshapes his world to hold both what was and what comes next. Maybe that’s all any of us can do: carry forward what we’ve lost, not as an absence, but as something changed. Something that still lives within us.