What do you say

What do you say? How do you tell a 2 year old her daddy was killed in a horrific car wreck?  were questions I had to answer this morning.  As i began thinking and praying for the words to say to Makenna, my friend Martha, a pre school director had great insight when she told me to keep the explanation simple and on her age level.  Although that may not be easy to do, the ground work had been laid two and one half years before without my even knowing I was laying that foundation at the time.

 You see when Makenna was born I wanted to be sure she knew all about her Pappa who had passed away two and one half years before she was born.  I began telling Makenna all about her Pappa: how he loved life, how he would have loved her, all the funny quirks about him, stories he told that only he could tell.  Today as I hear Makenna in her room talking I ask her who she is talking to and her reply is,"do you not know I am talking to my Pappa."
 I have prefaced with this in order to say when the time came for me to tell Makenna her daddy was in a horrific wreck and he was in heaven with Jesus she had a simple child like understanding of what I was talking about.  She knows who Jesus is and she knows Heaven is a wonderful place where her Pappa is and one day in a long long  time we will get to see Pappa and her daddy in heaven. That was all she wanted to know.  The next morning we went through the same routine we go through every morning.  "Where is my Mamma?  My Mamma at work ." Where is my Daddy? My Daddy at work?"  No baby, where is you Daddy? "My Daddy is  in Heaven."