Mortality from Jove's Point of View

Our fish, Io, is dying. In fact, let me check, nope he's still kind of alive. He has been becoming more and more horizontal each day and Jove has been telling everyone who comes to our house that Io is going to die. It has affected me more than I thought it would, since it isn't really an untimely death. Io is a Japanese Betta and has been with us for two years and survived numerous adventures in the car, being babysat by various family members and neighbors and forgetting to feed him occasionally. Maybe I feel guilty more than sad. Jove has plans to bury him behind our pool and says then the ants and larvae can carry him away.

Jove said a couple of nights ago at dinner that when he (himself, not Io) dies (Jupiter and I shoot each other a concerned glance) he will buried in a cemetery and then the ants and larvae can be carry him away. Jupiter says, "Yes, in a long, long time when you die you can buried in a cemetery, if you want." Jove responds, "What? I don't want to be buried. I would be lonely in the ground by myself." Jupiter says, "But, you wouldn't feel lonely if you're dead." Jove says, "What?" Exactly. A little confusing for a three year old.

Part of me thinks it a morbid topic for conversation, but since we have huge cemeteries near our house that Jove always asks about I have decided just to be honest about dead people getting buried there. At first I just told him it was like a park with stones, but then we would occasionally see funerals, flowers and he would ask, "Why are there so many stones with writing?" Plus, he knows that other living things die. Luckily, no one close to us has died that he can remember. Jove is just at the age where he picks up on everything and is started to understand the presence of bad and undesirable things in the world. It feels like parenting just got a lot trickier.