One of them nights

I am not an expert in child development but my son is now 8 and has started to realise that bad things happen to people. Sometimes watching a news story about a storm and he will get upset that people had floods etc.. He has talked about what it means to die when talking about Communion in church and Jesus dying. Last night he walked in while a story was on my television about a man who may of died from a spider bite. He was very upset and once cuddled up on the sofa together, he started crying. He is afraid of dying and afraid I will die. I explained how if anything happened to me, he would be taken care of, that I would watch him grow up from heaven, we acknowledged how sad we would be, but I also tried to explain that small things like spider bites don't normally kill people, that a cut on his leg wouldn't harm him. I guess what struck me most is that he doesn't really understand that the cancer could kill me. Despite how upsetting the conversation was, How hard it is as a parent to see your child lose a bit of their innocence as they realise the real word can be an unfair bad place. I was happy to have this one moment where it wasn't about the cancer.