The Harsh Reality of Halloween
Halloween can hit too close to home for kids who have experienced the death of a parent. My stepsons’ late mom died at home - they found her struggling to breathe, called 911, and attempted to administer CPR. When the EMTs arrived, they could not revive her. It was a traumatic event that will always impact their lives, especially when they hear stories every Halloween of ghosts haunting houses where they died. My youngest stepson still looks for signs that our house is haunted - we reassure him that his mom is in heaven and her spirit is at peace.
Halloween movies can conjure real-life terrors in these children as they watch characters talk with spirits, raise the dead, banish ghosts, and kill zombies. The statement, “Your mom is always with you,” is not comforting to a child who believes his mom is a ghost haunting his stepmom and trying to hurt her (as his grandmother told him). If they believe that Halloween is the one night a year when the dead can rise from their graves, how do children prepare their minds to see their mom again? With hope or fear? How do they cope with it not happening? With relief or disappointment?
For children who have lost a parent, Halloween often isn’t a carefree night of spooky stories and trick-or-treating. Death, for them, is not imaginary. The fear of losing another loved one is not imaginary. At the same time, resurrecting a body like Frankenstein is pure fiction, and their mother’s soul is not trapped in the neighborhood black cat. Our role is to help them distinguish what is real from what is pretend—to talk honestly about loss and the existence of evil in the world while reassuring them that they are safe, protected, and deeply loved.
We need to help children accept their loss and find peace, not focus on death and dying. A few Halloween movies get it close to right. The 1995 movie Casper is about a man who became an afterlife therapist following his wife’s death and his daughter. They moved into a house haunted by Casper and three other cantankerous ghosts. When the dad sees his wife in spirit form towards the movie’s end, she explains that they loved her so well in life that she has no unfinished business - she is at peace. While it was challenging for my stepsons to watch a movie about a girl whose mom died, the message resonated with them - their mom was well-loved too (something they know for sure in a world of unknowns); therefore, her soul must be at peace.
Death is brutal to process. Halloween symbolism about death and dying is brutal to process. We need to be mindful of how the symbolism affects children who have lost a parent and give them the extra love, support, and encouragement they need.