I know, but I worry about giving children misleading information. Especially given the possibility that they might grow into a world where radical life extension may become available for the first time, I believe we shouldn&#x27;t give them our thousands-year-old mantra of &quot;dead is good&quot; with all the fantasies and rationalisations that entails.<p>In my experience, children want to know very specific things about death, and I think we can answer them more truthfully and let them make up their own minds about the other things as they grow older. They usually want to know two things: <i>why</i> we die and what death will <i>feel like</i> for a person, which are totally reasonable questions.<p>The <i>why</i> can be answered by explaining that all things break, and when living beings break, they are no longer alive.<p>When my nephew recently asked what it&#x27;s like being dead, I said to him for the people who died it&#x27;s exactly like the time before they were born. That seemed to satisfy his concerns, and I hope this way of thinking will spare him the literal nightmares I had about death when I was 4, where people had told me I would spend eternity somewhere without a body.