Where's Waldo? Early Dealings with Death.

My first pet when I was just little was a hamster named Waldo.

Not Waldo. Just the cutest happiest hamster. Seriously. Link to Original.

I was too little to remember him, but in my head he will always be that first pet. The story that I have always been told was that one day when there was some construction going on at our house, someone (I can't remember whether it was a neighbour girl, a babysitter, or just a family friend) forgot to close his cage and Waldo got out. With so much commotion going on in the house and the door being kept open for the guys moving things in and out as they worked, no one would have noticed a tiny little furry buddy scurry out the door. At least that is the theory, no one in my family could ever definitively answer the question "Where's Waldo?"

As I started growing up I was aware of the fact (television and my generation of course) that parents would lie about pets deaths to their children who they felt were too young to deal with the idea of death. I talked to my mom about it as it related to Waldo and even now she assures me that Waldo just disappeared, and that he probably got out of his cage and ran away. I thought about it and what is harder for a child: a pet dying and having to learn about death, or a pet just disappearing with no explanation? Either way it means a little kid has to deal with the fact that something that was there is now gone.

The idea of children and how they are introduced or sheltered from the concept of death is one that I find extremely interesting. I took an english class on children's literature and we covered the material from the oldest to the newest looking at the roots of children's literature. That was the most shocking introduction to a course I think I have ever experienced. When we think of children's literature we think of the kinds of things we had when we were growing up. For instance later in the course we read "The Hobbit," and "The Paper Bag Princess," classics that I read when I was little. What we started with was the kind of depressing and dark stories like those from the brothers Grimm and their Fairy Tales and other tales that are filled with death and hopeless endings. These are not the Disney versions of my childhood. They remind me of Edward Gorey and his gruesome alphabet:

We were forced to confront the fact that children were not always looked at as innocent as we view children today. They did not live in the kind of world that sheltered them from everything sad or scary, it was right there in their world all the time. For the beginnings of children's literature it made sense as a necessary tool to teach children about death. Childhood mortality rates were much higher and therefore being a child in the past meant that you had to deal with death eventually, chances are that not all of your friends or your siblings were going to make it.

Knowing that even in the last few centuries the idea of children and their 'innocence' has changed dramatically makes it easier to look at different cultures and how they might look at death and childhood. If something that we take for granted with children in our own culture has changed so much what does that say about the way in which we do look at children. Just because we can shelter them from the bad things that we don't want to acknowledge, does that necessarily mean we should be doing that?