My three-year-old daughter is worried about dying. She tells us one morning that she’s going to die when she turns 18. Maybe to her, 18 is how I feel about turning 90 – that’s properly old. Later, I ask what is worrying her about dying. She doesn’t know. She’s three. She can’t quite articulate what it is that’s bothering her. We’re sitting in her room, getting ready for nursery. I’m trying and failing to brush her hair. She’s trying her best to not yelp in pain as I drag a brush through her curls.

I look up and see the small photo of my mum that sits on her shelf. My sister gave it to me to put in my daughter’s room around the time she was born. Mum died in 2011 and it devastated our family. She talked a lot about grandchildren, so it feels sad that she won’t be around to meet them. I start to worry that the photo is the thing that’s making my kid obsess about dying. She likes to run through various members of our family. She wants to know who my siblings are and how they are related to her, who her cousins are, who her grandparents are. She’ll ask me who my dad is, who my sister is and then make the connection with who they are to her.

When she first asked me where my mum was, I was taken aback. I didn’t initially know how to answer her. On the one hand, I hate it when parents do saccharine lies to their kids: they’re on holiday, they live on a farm far away, they’re having a long sleep. On the other, my kid’s three. She won’t really understand about death. I chose to be honest. I told her: “My mum isn’t around any more. She’s dead. She would have loved you very much.” My daughter then asked me: “Do you miss your mum?” “Yes,” I said. “It makes me feel sad she is not here.” After that, my daughter kept asking where Mum was and whether I felt sad. One day, she said: “What happens when we die?” I told her that it meant we weren’t around any more. “I don’t want to die,” she said.

I think she has an existential dread when it comes to death. It’s not so much about the dying, it’s about the simply not being there, the void created by your absence. It’s a lot for a three-year-old to take in. A visit to an Egyptian exhibition at Bristol Museum further confused her, because the mummies and the coffins and the death rituals that were explained to her didn’t really answer her question about where my mum was.

How do you talk to kids about death? There are some great books that help you talk about grief and loss with them. I like how Michael Rosen’s Sad Book tries to encapsulate the emotion of sadness and demystify it, make the reader feel like it is OK to feel sad, because we all do. Oliver Jeffers’s The Heart and the Bottle is another tear-jerker about loss and dealing with the death of a grandparent. Both of the books help kids navigate the emotions around loss and bereavement.

The particular issue I seem to have is that my mum has been dead for a while. How do you functionally explain death to a child who has no emotional attachment to the dead person, because they didn’t know them? Maybe that’s the wrong question entirely, but it’s one I keep circling back to. Mostly because I grieve for my mother every day and I wear my pain at her death very overtly on my sleeve. My daughter, being empathetic, can sense that that picture of my mum is important to me, but how does she make a connection with someone she only knows in the abstract?

These conversations we have with kids around death need to be tangible. And while I work out the best way to talk about it with my child, she’s still doing her own version of processing the very concept of death by checking in with me about what it even means. While death is something we’ll all experience in some way, is three years old too early to be dealing with the preciousness of life?