Like brother like sister

Today over breakfast, my three year old son announced, "I don't want to die". All I could think was: uh oh, here we go again.

Correct me if I'm wrong, but shouldn't the most pressing matter on the mind of a three year old be, like, whether his sandwich is cut in squares or triangles?

I told Charlie that when we die, our souls go to heaven. Heaven is a beauti- wait! No, it's not beautiful! - heaven is a SUPER COOL place where we all have lots of fun. (Charlie tells us often that he doesn't like beautiful things, only cool things). "But," he argued, "then Lua won't like it because she only likes beautiful things, and she doesn't like any of my very cool toys".

"Heaven is great", I assured him. "Everybody is happy there". He was not convinced. In fact, he wanted to know if there was reincarnation ("after we die do we come back here again?") .

I assured Charlie that heaven is awesome, and that I would go there before him so I could show him around. And I told him that it's okay to die because death is a part of life, but that he won't die until he is VERY VERY old. Then he wanted to know if Santa would be in heaven. Ugh. Who even told him about Santa? Oops, probably me. Why did I have to show him the claymation movie of Rudolph the Red Nosed Reindeer last December? That was a mistake, because if we're lying about that, we could be lying about anything right? I told him I didn't know.

Sigh. Life and death are so complicated.