Not only were the Japanese Netsuke craftsmen personally being openly expressive and very individual with their highly detailed creations, but so were those that chose to wear the openly expressive Netsuke carvings.

The Netsuke handcrafting designers and the collectors of today have continued to carry the history, tradition, the beauty and the passion for the love of Netsuke today, just as was felt by the original Japanese creators and collectors in the beginnings of Netsuke so many centuries ago within the Japanese culture.

Explaining death involves two issues. What is it, literally, and what happens to the person when she dies. The former question is best answered in a simple and honest manner - grandma’s heart had grown too weak to enable her to breathe, to see, think, or walk. With young children (below 7 or 8), no answer is going to feel very complete but understand that young children don’t need or want much information. Just a simple sentence to explain what happened. Avoid euphemistic explanations equating death with sleep (not only incorrect but likely to increase the child’s fear of sleep or darkness, which is a common, brief reaction to death anyway) or saying that God decided it was time for her to go to heaven. The latter makes God sound mean and capricious and increases the child’s sense of vulnerability.