My oldest child, Alex, is a worrier like me. When he was about nine he was having a hard time sleeping at night because he was feeling afraid -- not of monsters or earthquakes or robbers, but of dying. He'd slip out of bed and creep around the dark house looking for me so I could come cuddle his fear away enough for him to sleep.

Usually we wouldn't talk too much, since it was always late and we were sleepy. One night, though, we were both awake and we had a great talk. He gave me permission to share it here.

He wanted to know what happens to us after we die. We'd talked about it before, and he'd been to funerals, too. But I figured if he was asking he needed to discuss it more. I knew it would be best to simplify things a little bit, so I just said that our bodies stopped working and that our spirits went on without our bodies. We talked about coffins and cemeteries and cremation. We talked about all different kinds of beliefs, including heaven, reincarnation, and the fact that I don't believe in hell, but some people do.

He wanted to know how, exactly, people knew that our spirits went somewhere after we die.

"No one does know that a hundred percent," I told him, "but if you look around you, it makes sense. Look at nature: the water cycle; how plants grow from seeds, flower, then make new seeds that grow into new plants; and the fact that energy cannot be created or destroyed suggests that our spirits go on after our bodies die."

He took that in for a moment; not really convinced.

"You know, Alex," I said, "before you were born you lived in my uterus for nine months. As you grew closer to your birth day, you were able to hear my voice. You were living in a small, dark, place, totally submerged in water, and you didn't have any idea at all about the world you were going to be born into. You never could have imagined it. And, you didn't really know me, but you had an idea of me, since you could hear me talk and you could hear and feel my heart beat. Think about that for a minute. I think that when we die we go through something similar, but it's not anything we could imagine now."

We talked some more after that, both of us feeling a little bit better, a little bit less afraid. After all, he's not the only person in the house who worries about that kind of thing.