Do you remember when you first understood, first knew, that someday you were going to die? I don’t, but I can recall the next worst thing: walking home from kindergarten one sunny afternoon by myself (that’s how it was done in 1963) and realizing that, someday, inevitably, my mother would die. I wish I could remember what prompted this realization; whatever it was, it descended upon me, unbidden and terrifying.

I ran all the way home (not far), where my mom assured me that, yes, she would die one day, but that that day was far, far away, and nothing for me to worry about now. I probably ought to have wondered, How does she know? But her answer must have soothed me well enough because, decades later, with the shoe on the other foot, I fobbed the same parental boilerplate off on my own young children. I did feel a twinge of guilt over making a potentially false promise, but so far, so good. Knock wood.

It is hard enough to be honest with ourselves about death, and exponentially more so with kids. Yet, euphemisms about sending missing pets to farms upstate notwithstanding, kids are well aware of it, just as they are of sex. For those of us who are parents, one of our jobs is to help our children understand the end of life, to whatever extent—if any—we ourselves do. And, for those of us too faint of heart to engage the subject head on, there is an entire category of children’s literature that has aimed to help, though not always in the way one might hope.

When the very notion of children’s literature came into being, in the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries, a bent for Christian moral instruction combined with horribly high infant- and child-mortality rates to produce works steeped in blunt fatalism. Take, for instance, “The New England Primer,” which was published in Boston, circa 1690, and is thought to be the first American children’s book. It remained popular into the nineteenth century, though I can’t imagine any actual child, no matter how pious or masochistic, reading with much relish the tail end of its alphabet lesson, from a 1777 edition:

X: Xerxes did die And so must I Y: While youth do cheer Death may be near

In time, this strain of hortatory morbidity would grow into a robust genre of kids’ books, exemplified by popular titles such as “An Authentic Account of the Conversion, Experience, and Happy Deaths of Ten Boys,” which was published in Philadelphia, in 1820, and intended for Sunday-school use. This excerpt, profiling a youth named William Quayle, “who spent a life (short as it was) to the glory of God,” will give you the flavor:

In September, 1787, he was seized with his last sickness, which continued about a fortnight. . . . When his father used to express his hope that he would recover, he replied, “I would rather die than stay here.” A few minutes before he died he cried out, “Father! Father! Mother! Mother! O my heaven! My heaven!” He then sang a hymn . . . and instantly fell asleep on the arms of his dear Redeemer, September 24th, in the ninth year of his age.

Modern readers may recoil, or laugh; so did some nineteenth-century ones, among them Mark Twain, who, in 1870, wrote a parody, titled “The Story of the Good Little Boy Who Did Not Prosper.” (“It felt a little uncomfortable sometimes when he reflected that the good little boys always died. . . .”) But the anonymous authors of “An Authentic Account” and like-minded works were merely doing their generous best to save children from what was then seen as a literal threat of being “driven into hell” and “tormented there for ever, amongst devils and miserable creatures,” as the afterword to “An Authentic Account” puts it. The author, in his or her mind, was literally on the side of the angels.

In modern times, with our angels now of a less Manichean, more touchy-feely persuasion, we have witnessed an increasing popularity of books eager to usher kids through the “grieving process.” Writing in a special 1991 issue of the Children’s Literature Association Quarterly devoted to the topic, the scholars Louis Rauch Gibson and Laura M. Zaidman cited a survey from 1977 that found that ninety per cent of all children’s books dealing with death had been published since 1970—a hefty percentage that, one imagines, has only increased in the time since.

Titles in this vein, which is often referred to as “crisis literature,” are, unsurprisingly, heavy on stories about the passing of the elderly (“My Grandpa Died Friday,” “My Grandpa Died Today,” “Why Did Grandpa Die?,” “So Long, Grandpa”). Pets also tend to do a fair share of yeoman’s work. “The Tenth Good Thing About Barney,” written, in 1971, by Judith Viorst (also known for “Alexander and the Terrible, Horrible, No Good, Very Bad Day”) and illustrated by Erik Blegvad, begins, “My cat Barney died last Friday. I was very sad. I cried, and I didn’t watch television. I cried, and I didn’t eat my chicken or even the chocolate pudding.” Asked by his mother to say ten good things about Barney at the cat’s back-yard funeral, the nameless young narrator can only think of nine—until the next day, when he’s gardening with his father and has a revelation. The tenth good thing: “Barney is in the ground and he’s helping grow flowers.”

While I wholeheartedly endorse Viorst’s circle-of-life sentiment, I find the tone of her book cloying and its dénouement pat. I get stuck, especially, on that bit about not eating the chocolate pudding; it’s the kind of thing that an adult might think a child would find relatable, but my inner six-year-old feels condescended to. Dead pet or no, I’ve rarely known a kid not to be jollied up by a decent dessert, at least a little.

The picture book “Missing Mommy,” written and illustrated by Rebecca Cobb, and first published in Britain, in 2011, offers a more nuanced portrait of a far more devastating kind of loss. In it, a little boy whose mother has recently died works through a series of sometimes conflicting feelings: “I feel so scared because I don’t think she is coming back. . . . And then I feel angry because I really want her to come back. . . . I am worried that she left because I was naughty sometimes. . . . The other children have THEIR moms. It’s not fair.” Subtitled “A Book About Bereavement,” this is less a story than a catalogue of troubling but normal emotions—more a therapeutic tool than a book, per se. The last spread shows the little boy watering some tulips (the circle of life again, though less literal than in Barney’s case) while the text concludes, “I will always remember her. I know how special I was to my mommy and she will always be special to me.” This ending is sensitive. It’s heartbreaking. It’s validating. I hope you never have cause to read it to a child.