It was an average Sunday morning. In my household, Sunday mornings often include a special breakfast if my husband or I aren’t required to be at church early to serve in some capacity. But this wasn’t my household. It was my son and his family’s, and this story involves their four-year-old. How do we get from an average Sunday morning to dead people downstairs? Allow me to connect the dots for you in a way you might never have considered.

If you don’t know this about me, I am enthralled with four-year-olds. They are beginning to put the pieces of the world together into a semblance of order. However, with their limited vocabulary and ability to express ideas, that order is often askew. And that leads to moments of sheer delight, this being one of them.

It was too early to leave for church that Sunday, so my son and his seven-year-old were playing a game. He invited the four-year-old to join in and received this excited response, “No, I’m going downstairs to see dead people.” The junior member of the family was in a hurry to beetle downstairs and had no time for games.

His stunned father asked the little one to repeat his explanation and added that he had no idea what he was talking about. Was there something he didn’t know about down there? The answer he received was equally puzzling, “I’m going downstairs to see dead people with Mommy.” My son was unaware that they had dead people downstairs.

As my daughter-in-law related this story to me, visions popped into my head of corpses piled in their family room. Or a previously undiscovered grave inadvertently unearthed somehow. Those thoughts prompted many questions in my mind. The first ones being, “Who were they, how did they get there, and why would my son not know this?” followed by, “Do the authorities know about them?”

As this amusing conversation evolved, Mommy quietly listened in the background and enjoyed the entertaining exchange. A mother after my own heart! Then, she filled in the missing pieces to make sense of her son’s urgent need to head downstairs for the viewing.

Earlier in the morning, mother and son had been discussing that all of her grandparents had died, so he wouldn’t be able to meet them. She offered to show him some PICTURES if he wanted to see them. That critical bit of information somehow escaped inclusion in the four-year-old’s explanation. So, they were going downstairs to look at pictures of dead people—her grandparents. My son’s paternal grandparents are still living, and their family occasionally visits them, so this conversation was filling in a critical piece of family history.

There are no bodies buried in my son’s family room. There are no corpses piled there for children to examine. No zombies await the right moment to spring to life when unsuspecting little ones stumble upon them. There are photos on a shelf that keep the memory of dearly loved elders alive, people the next generation won’t have the privilege of knowing in this life. They are the dead people downstairs.

Don’t you love four-year-olds?