Death in a little girl's eyes

For the past few days, Kouryou-chan has been asking Elf and me permission to sleep in our bed. This isn't unusual in and of itself...though being five, we still occasionally have a group sleep night in the big king-size bed that Elf and I sleep in, usually on the weekends. But now it's every night. She's also waking up at nights with nightmares, and they are always the same...she's had a dream where she's lost me.

Well, tonight I found out where this is all coming from. Apparently, the mother of one of the kids at her summer daycamp has died (I don't know when) and everyone at the daycamp knows about it. Including Kouryou-chan. Sigh.

So now starts the conversations of death and what happens afterwards. I couldn't lie to her and say that I would be with her always. But I can't tell her just that I would die some day. So I told her that everyone dies eventually, that I believe in reincarnation, and that I believed our souls would always be together. We talked a bit about what that was and did a little creative thinking about what kinds of things that we could come back as.

She wants to come back as a rainbow.