after my aunt died, i was really sad because i couldn't talk to her anymore. I remembered that on Lion King, Rafiki the monkey let simba talk to mufasa by touching the lake with his magic stick. i didn't have a lake or a magic stick so i would sit by the bath tub poking it with a broom tryin to talk to my aunt.

briana

I used to believe that you would get a letter in the mail and that told you that it was your time to die. I thought you would enter the big gates of the cemetary and then soldiers would come out at shoot you. What also supported my idea was the large gates and fences which I thought were there to prevent you from running out without being shot.

Susan P.

when i was little and on a family outing or trip
we were driving past a cemetary my dad would alwaysmake that corny old joke "thats the dead centre of [Birmingham/Chester/Liverpool etc]"
but i took it seriously and for years (and i mean, til like my early teens) i beleived that cemetaries had to be built in the actual centre of a town. like it was a rule or something.
until of course, me and some mates were on a school trip when we were 13 and got lost in the middle of birmingham, we knew that the train station in new street mustbe pretty centrally located so i helpfully suggested "well lets just look for the graveyard, thats the dead centre of town, the station should be nearby"
they had to point out the joke for about 5 minutes whilst laughing hysterically before i would beleive it wasnt actually true, i kept saying, no really, my dad told me, and was even really tempted to make up something like, hes a town planner or an architect or something to save face. oh god i am so embarrassed by this one!!!!

chrissydontsurf

when i was young i used to believe the meat we eat at funerals was of a dead person. i used to have problem eating at funerals....

OG

When I was three or four years old, I must have been anxious about the concept of burial, because I remember being told that only the body gets put in the ground, while the soul goes to Heaven.

I guess I didn't know what a 'soul' was, but I knew that my 'body' was all the parts of me other than my head; therefore, souls must be heads. I had this mental picture of headless bodies underground in coffins, and Heaven as a beautiful garden full of happy disembodied heads.

Several of my elderly relatives died when I was around that age, and I probably gave up on that idea when I went to an open-casket funeral and saw that the body in the coffin did still have a head.

Brenda

In my neighborhood we have notelephone poles, or wires or anything running along the outsides of the houses. All the wires are run underground. Out by my driveway in the ground there is a thing for the electrical companies to get to the wires if they need to. I used to think that this was my Grandpa Tony's grave. I used to pray by it, & place dandelions that i had picked from my yard on top.

Dani

Once, when I was three, a distant relative of ours died. My mom and I went to the funeral after having a long conversation about death and what happens in terms that (she thought) a three-year-old could understand. She asked me, "So you know where people go when they die, right?" She expected me to respond with "Heaven". I nodded, very solemnly, and then replied with, "They go to Florida."

Ellie

There is a girl in our Year 3 class (8 yrs old) whose nan has sadly passed away recently due to a stroke.

We were obvoiously concerned about her, particulary as she was displaying some really odd behaviour soon after the death - she kept walking up to her class teacher, and gently patting her on the arm and then standing back and staring at her intently.

It took a while, but we eventually worked out that she didn't understand why her nan had died, and was seeing if she could kill her teacher by giving her a 'stroke'!

Mr Staples

When I was young, I never could understand how they could get the people pictured on the obituary pages to smile. After all, they were dead!

arline

When I heard of reincarnation, the ability to die and come back as a animal, I dug up a worm in the lawn and said,"Is that you, Uncle John?".

reincarnated as a worm

i used to think that every dead person had a cloud for a home and if all the clouds joined up someone was having a party

party in the sky

My dad told me a funeral home was a place where they put dead people on display. I misinterpereted it an thought that they put them up as museum exhibits. They would say things like "And this is Vinny Jackson, died in 1990 of a gunshot"

Anon

My father's mother died when I was little. She was a rowdy opinonated German woman who drank a lot of beer. She scared me most of the time because of her loud voice. When she died, people at the funeral kept telling me, "Even though you can't see her, she'll always be looking after you."

I thought that was terrible. I felt like I could never do anything in private because of that. I used to sneak cans of beer up to my room, and leave them on the windowsill, hoping they would distract her while I played with my dolls.

Easily Amused

My grandpa died when I was very young, and I went with my mom and grandma to the funeral parlor. The funeral director asked my grandma if she wanted baby’s breath for the coffin. I thought this was some type of air supply that was being built into the coffin that would allow him to take very small breaths and part of me feared that we were burying him alive.

Anon

My mom named me after her beloved cat, Melissa, who was still alive when I was about 4. By then, I had already learned that when an animal was sick, you had to put it down. (we had already lost one of our dogs) Then, one night, when I had the flu, I came downstairs to get a glass of water, and I overheard my mom saying "Yeah, Melissa is so sick... I think I'm going to have to put her down." I was terrified, so I ran back upstairs and convinced myself that if I went right to bed, I would get better in the morning, and I wouldn't have to die.

Melissa the cat

When I was about four, I sometimes got tired around noon and would fall asleep on the couch. Then one day I had to go to my grandfather's funeral. He looked just like a sleeping person! After that, I was worried that if I took a nap on the couch, my mom would think that I died and bury me. I asked my dad to write a note that said "I'm still alive," and when I felt like a nap, I would tape it to my shirt so my mom would know I wasn't dead.

A.

When I was about 5, we went to the cemetary to visit my grandmother's grave. We passed a grave that someone had decorated with balloons, and I looked up at my mom and said (in all seriousness), "There must be a clown buried there."

Amy

When I was little, I knew that when people died, you buried them. Therefore, it was only logical that when babies were 'born', you dug them up out of the ground! I don't know why I thought that...probably something to do with the whole 'ashes to ashes, dust to dust' phrase.

Clinton

I think I was about five or six, but I developed this fascination with burping, sneezing, hiccupping, etc., and came up with the idea that if you did several such things at the same time, you would instantly die. I was sure that my dad knew the answer, but I couldn't just ask him straight out. I would say, "What would happen if you cough, sneeze, fart, burp, and hiccup at the same time?" I would be dissappointed when his answer didn't involve death. So I would re-phrase the question, (e.g. sneeze, hiccup, burp, cough, and fart), to try to ascertain the correct order. I was sure some combination would be lethal.

Anon

After my grandmother died, my parents kept telling me that we would always have a part of Grandma with us. On the car ride back from the funeral, there was a bag on the seat beside me. When I touch it, it was squishy, just as I imagined a liver or a heart would feel. Was it true that we were taking home an actual part of Grandma? I was petrified of that bag for the entire trip home. It turned out to be pound cake.

Silly girl