As I prepared to head out for dinner with a friend, I whipped up a simple meal of chicken nuggets, steamed broccoli, and apple slices for my little ones. Grateful that my partner was managing the evening alone, I wanted to avoid any culinary surprises that could lead to bedtime meltdowns. Just as I was about to leave, my 4-year-old son, Max, mumbled something about chickens, but I didn’t fully catch it. I reminded him to be good for his dad and dashed out the door.
Once settled at the restaurant, I received a text from my partner. “Just a heads up: Max has figured out that people die, and he’s not handling it well.”
Max is a sensitive soul—he can’t even listen to soft acoustic songs without tearing up. I knew this was going to be a challenging situation. My partner is a great dad, so I trusted him to manage it while I enjoyed my evening.
When I returned home, the kids were tucked in bed. My partner filled me in on the night’s events. That comment I’d missed earlier? It was about the chicken nuggets and their connection to real chickens. We generally try to be straightforward with our kids, so my partner had explained that yes, those nuggets came from real chickens. We had had similar conversations before, where Max didn’t seem to connect the dots between the meat on his plate and the animals they came from. But this time, something clicked.
“But the chicken nuggets don’t have feathers,” he said.
“They lose their feathers before we cook them,” my partner explained.
Max chuckled, “So the chicken is naked when you cook it? Won’t it be cold?”
“The chicken doesn’t feel cold because it is killed before the farmer takes its feathers off,” my partner replied.
And then it spiraled from there.
Max asked if all chickens are killed, and my partner explained that while some are killed, others die naturally—eventually, all animals die.
“Will my pets die?” came the heart-wrenching question.
We have two cats and a dog, and while Max typically shows little interest in them, they’ve been part of our family for years. “Yes, one day, our pets will die,” my partner answered.
It broke my heart to think of a 4-year-old crying at the thought of losing his beloved pets. My partner tried to comfort him, but it was clear this was more complex than a simple reassurance.
“Do people die too?” Max’s voice was small.
“Yes,” my partner confirmed.
This was an abstract concept for Max, one we hadn’t prepared to explain at this stage. As my partner recounted the evening’s conversation, I felt tears well up. It was a painful reminder of the innocence slipping away from our child—all triggered by a plate of chicken nuggets.
My partner shared how Max asked if we would die, to which he assured him that not for a long time. But then Max cried that he didn’t want us to “leave.” I interrupted, “Did he ask what happens after we die?”
Thankfully, he hadn’t, and I felt a wave of relief wash over me. What would we say? My partner and I are atheists, raising our kids without religious beliefs. We think death is the end of the story—no afterlife or reincarnation. While it’s a heavy concept, it’s not something we wanted to burden our young son with just yet.
I began to panic about how to address this if Max brought it up again. A friend offered a comforting suggestion. She had told her daughter that when someone dies, they become stars. This way, when her daughter missed her great-grandmother, she could look up at the night sky and find her among the stars.
This idea resonated deeply with me, particularly with a quote from the esteemed scientist Carl Sagan: “We are made of starstuff.”
The following morning wasn’t filled with tears or fear. Max woke up cheerful. When I asked how he felt about the previous night’s discussion, he calmly stated, “He told me animals die and people die.”
“Do you have any questions about that?” I probed.
“Do we have a video of the chicken dying?” he asked.
As unexpected as the previous night’s revelations had been, I found myself in a peculiar situation. My mind raced with images of grim factory farm footage. I quickly replied, “No, we don’t have any videos of that.”
“Can we buy the DVD?” he asked, and in that moment, I realized I was still dealing with a 4-year-old capable of shifting topics in an instant. Gone was the worry about his understanding of mortality; I was now hopeful he would become a vegan instead of a psychopath.
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In summary, my son’s realization about death was a significant moment—a painful yet necessary step in understanding life’s fragility, all sparked by a simple meal of chicken nuggets.