I am really glad my wish to take this to a bit of a deeper level was not interpreted incorrectly and I'm glad that some people are digging looking a little deeper than just the OP's initial thoughts and questions.

I have known many kids these days who really think that water comes from a sink and food comes from a store. I know a bunch of kids who have not seen any death at all. Our roads are cleaned of road kill quickly, our elders die in hospitals and other institutions, and death these days is more thought of as defeat (or something) than as a natural process. Heck, with so much plastic surgery going on, people don't even seem to grow old anymore!!

I fully realize the trickiness to parenting and wanting to protect our children and their feelings. I often feel that we are protecting them from what we were protected from, and then discovered at a later time, and felt some discomfort from with our discovery (in this discussion, death.) For example, people who grew up closer to the earth, farming families for instance, understood that death = life, in many instances and so I would suspect that their children also were taught this in a matter of fact manner. City dwellers though were removed from the process of death and so they protect their children from it.

Hmmm, I'm wondering if this makes sense? Maybe it's just time to grab some ice cream and watch my taped episode of Dr. Who