wilkesjosiah
New member
9 months ago my dad suddenly passed away. My daughter and I were very close to him. He was actually living with us at the time and my daughter had gotten very used to seeing him every day from the time he woke up to the time she went to bed. She’d go down in our finished basement where he was staying and where her play room also is and play with him for hours. One night, my dad went outside to smoke a cigarette in the middle of the night. When he came inside, he tripped down the stairs and hit his head on the cross beam so hard the medical examiner said he was likely dead before he hit the ground. The next morning as my husband, my daughter, and I all woke up, chaos ensued. Me and my husband found him, called the cops, and tried desperately to keep my daughter who was 3 at the time away from the basement stairs without scaring her. I was a mess. There were police and EMTs running through the house, then detectives, all sorts of strange people my daughter didn’t know. Following his death I tried very hard to explain to my daughter lightly that grandpa has died and we have to say goodbye to him. Of course, she was 3 so she didn’t really have the ability to digest how permanent death is. I made it my goal to make sure she felt comfortable talking to me about it and that it was okay to feel sad or scared. I didn’t want grandpas death, a huge point in her life, to feel like a taboo subject she couldn’t talk about. Fast forward 9 months and she still talks about him on an almost daily basis. She says she’s sad because she misses my dad, she asks when the cops are going to bring grandpa back, and she brings him up often and very nonchalantly to random people she meets at parks, the neighbors, etc. the other day I was talking on the phone with her grandpa that’s still around and when I told her to say hi to “grandpa (insert this grandpas name here)” but she misheard me, got very excited and asked if the cops brought my dad back finally. This breaks my heart and I don’t know if I’m not handling something quite right. I never took her to a child therapist but I was seeing a therapist after the death and she seemed to approve of how I was handling it with my daughter. But i don’t know if it’s normal for him to still be on her mind this often and if there’s something better I could do to help her move on. Child psychologists or general psychologists, I would be very grateful for any tips that might be helpful for me to help my daughter in a still very hard time.