. . . Evidently there is some psych lit that says that seeing a story with an infant/mother death would have a bad effect on the younger child. I have no idea if this is so. You see worse stuff every night on the news, so I'm skeptical.
I am too. I think children are much less freaked out by death than grownups. When I was a child, one of the things I liked to do was to go to the cemetery with my grandmother. This was a Romanian cemetery (kind of like a Mexican one). The graves were all different, clearly marked by class distinctions: the rich got little marble mausoleums; the poor got a filled hole and a cross, but the overall feeling was that you were visiting the dead at home. It was sweet and the inscriptions on the gravestones were fascinating.
Just recently I sat with my ten year old and watched an old Swedish film "My Life as a Dog," a great movie that tells the story of a boy whose mother is dying of TB and who is farmed out to various relatives. My daughter loved the movie (despite the subtitles), wished it could go on for ever, and watched it a few more times in the following days.
It's strange that one of the most gruesome (almost pornographic) maternal deaths on film: that of Bambi's mother, is not only a piece of movie-making that every kid winds up watching, but a made-for-kids Disney package. Maybe it's not so strange. I think a lot of Disney films are loathsome.
Joanna
