A story for home

Last fall, my two boys, 5 and 8, and I read Sophia Lyon Fahs' From Long Ago and Many Lands as our bedtime stories for a few weeks. We'd read one or two a night, sometimes doing the Judith Frediani questions at the end, sometimes not. Favorites emerged right away, but what surprised me was how a handful of stories really stuck with them; they'd bring them up months later, and correct each other on the specifics of their retellings.

One of those stories was "Mustard Seed Medicine." In it, a mother has a cherished and beloved son who, at the age of 4, dies. She brings the boy's body to the Buddha, who tells her that he knows the cure to her suffering. He tells her to go gather from her neighbors mustard seeds. The catch, though, is that the mustard seeds must come from a house where no one has been touched by death. In going through this exercise, the mother realizes the sad truth that no one--not one of her neighbor's lives--has not been touched by death in some way. It was not some mystical mustard seeds that brought her relief but the knowledge that this kind of terrible and deep sorrow is part of being human.

So, I began work today on some story pieces to make that story into a story basket for us to have here at home.

That's the mother figure on the left, then her young son, the Buddha, and one neighbor character.

I am learning how to do wood burning and paint on wood with watercolors, too, for this purpose. This was an early attempt.

I envision making a few little houses, too, to represent the neighbors' homes, and one house that opens to hold the Buddha and then the mother and son when they come to him.

Here's my idea of how to facilitate the going from house to house (using a house I had around, from "The Stranger's Gift" set).

In the Fahs version, the mother carries her dead son's body around, physically carrying out the mental anguish of not being able to "let go." I think this might best be represented with a two-sided figure of the son, one side (shown above) being featureless and washed out. My own children were most fascinated by the death of the child (and second most fascinated by the fact that none of the neighbors had not known death), so I really want a way for children to be able to work through that idea--living boy on one side, dead boy on the other, living boy on one side, dead boy on the other. And I plan to have a proper row of houses so the point can really be brought home that family after family after family confronts, deals with, and moves through the death of a loved one.