Libraries can work hand-in-hand with parents to serve as places we turn to when we are at a loss for words during life’s most challenging moments.
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Libraries across the country are facing censorship issues, angry protests and laws limiting their ability to fulfill their missions, including in my home state of Kentucky. I visited my local library to talk to librarians about the debates surrounding them and their books as indoctrinators of children at the expense of parents’ rights.
Critics of libraries have it wrong. Libraries aren’t threatening parents’ rights. They are protecting them. The death of a beloved library bunny can tell us how, rather than forcing children to think a certain way, libraries help us find our words in life’s most challenging moments.
This is when I learned about Lily.
How Librarians Prepared Children for Lily’s Death
Lily the bunny sat in a hutch just to the right of the youth section’s circulation desk and near the door to the storytime room, so children had plenty of opportunities to get to know her.
A few weeks before I started talking with my local librarians, Lily died. Even when dealing with their own sadness, the librarians acted promptly to make sure they were on the same page and had the right words to help parents support their children in the wake of Lily’s death.
They met and considered carefully what they would say. Did Lily “go to a farm”? No. It did not feel right to lie to children. Did Lily die? No. It also did not feel right to introduce children to death if parents wanted to be in control of that conversation.
The librarians settled on the idea that “Lily had retired.” They prepared a resource page to hand to parents with lists of children’s books that talked about grief and death, along with websites that parents could consult if they chose to do so.
Their approach was to do everything they could to prepare for the inevitability that children would notice Lily was gone, while also giving parents total control over any conversations about death.
“That way, it’s up to each parent, if they want to have that conversation about death with their kids or not,” one librarian told me. “Telling people that she retired … that has been hard enough, I don’t want to tell hundreds of kids and have that conversation with every single kid … I want that to be their guardians’ conversation.”
Their approach was to do everything they could to prepare for the inevitability that children would notice Lily was gone while also giving parents total control over any conversations about death.
The previous librarian continued, “What you don’t see is all the behind-the-scenes work of how we had that conversation about what to do about the rabbit. … Parents don’t know that we really did think about it, and like tossed around a lot of options of wording before we came up with that. But we did. … I wish people operated more on the assumption of the library is trying its best.”
Libraries: More Than Just Books
At a time when libraries have been in the news as threats to parental rights and as sources of inappropriate knowledge, I was struck by what Lily’s story could teach us about a library’s efforts to defend those very rights and the role that libraries play in our communities as places we turn to when we are at a loss for words during life’s most challenging moments.
Lily the bunny’s passing was not the only time my librarians had to deal with loss and grief. One librarian told me of a father who, immediately after his wife’s death, drove straight to the library with his two children because he did not know what else to do. “He said, ‘I really need you to help me.’ And I don’t even remember how I navigated that, but somehow, we did.”
This same librarian recalled when a child passed away who was a regular at the storytime she led every week. She attended this child’s funeral. When it was time for the closing hymn, she recollected, “They sang the goodbye song from storytime. There was the song that we sang every storytime at the end—that was the goodbye song. Every storytime we did the same one. Those kids got up there, and they started singing the goodbye song from storytime. And I lost it. I just wept.”
Helping parents and children find their words during moments of loss and grief is just one example of, to use one librarian’s phrase, “life critical services” that librarians and libraries provide.
Books, and their stewards, equip us with the words we lack; they show us there is a better tomorrow on the other side of today’s tragedy.
Thinking back on my childhood, I do not remember a lot of books, but I do remember one: My parents used to read me Runaway Bunny, which shows children how far a parent will go to bring them home safely.
Bunnies, in fact, have long been teaching children life lessons about growing up, love, and, of course, loss.
- Little Nutbrown Hare in Guess How Much I Love You—a book I have read to my children probably a thousand times—teaches children the depth of a parent’s love.
- Peter Rabbit shows children that parents are unwavering in their love, no matter how naughty they may be.
- The Velveteen Rabbit, through the story of a boy, sickness, and his stuffed bunny, reminds us that we are all made real through the love of others.
Books, and their stewards, equip us with the words we lack; they show us there is a better tomorrow on the other side of today’s tragedy.
The world’s problems do not go away if we simply choose not to face them. Hard conversations become harder later if we choose to avoid them. And no one would fault a parent for wanting to shield a child from problems and be the person to whom their children turn when they have tough questions. What’s being misunderstood at the moment is that librarians want this for parents and children, too.
Even Lily, the beloved library pet, continues, in death, to empower parents and their children to find their words.
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