Paper Lighthouses: Illustrated Books to Illuminate Death

We fear it, we avoid it, or we surround it with metaphors like amulets. We don't like to talk about death . And even less so when it comes to children .

However, some illustrated books address the topic with colorful pages and without emblems, dogmas, or desire for easy consolation.

Almost 25 years ago, Australian Shaun Tan —who won an Oscar for the animated short The Lost Thing —published The Red Tree , a marvel for readers of all ages. Time flies, and it never ceases to be a relief.

If you've read it, you'll surely remember it (if not, don't miss it). It displays a series of landscapes—in which the creatures are descended from those painted by Bosch in the 1400s—united by the figure of a silent girl and a minimal thread of text .

The protagonist of The Red Tree wakes up amidst dark leaves falling from her bedroom ceiling like a shower of threats. She walks down the street, stalked by an immense fish. She navigates, fragile, in a paper boat. And when she tries to speak, the letters fall from her mouth, like loose pieces.

Hope seems lost. But the girl returns to her room and finds a tree growing from the parquet floor, "deep red, with a warm light." The tree may be old, but it won't be there forever. Or will it?

Now, I Have a Friend Who Died ( Limonero Publishing), written by children's singer-songwriter Patricio Famulari and illustrated by Chilean-Portuguese author Amanda Baeza , has appeared. The text and images are complemented by a song (printed with a QR code with the link).

The work was born from the song Famulari composed for a friend of his who died, Matías Conte . The editors of Limonero listened to him and previewed the book. Then they too lost a friend and mentor, Fernando Pérsico . And there was no more doubt. Baeza contributed his beautiful deformed forms. Isn't the world that keeps on moving like this, deformed?

"I have a friend who died, and there's no poetry for that," says the young protagonist. Who feels grown up in the face of death, right? But, as the pages turn, art, as a way out, arrives.

Illustrations can show what is barely intuited and unnameable. On the other hand, there is music that is love in search of words. When those images and sounds meet, right where language stumbles , that quality is enhanced.

The Red Book and I Have a Friend Who Died don't offer biological or religious explanations for death. Or rather, not just that.

I like it. Because, in the face of pain, we won't always be able to understand, much less imagine, that an end can be a beginning . However, we will invariably need a hug, a story, a painting, music.

In the end, perhaps even death has meaning. Some stand out in Wolf Erlbruch 's The Duck, Death, and the Tulip , a classic like The Red Tree .

The book tells the story of a duck who discovers that a stranger, death, won't leave his side. They become friends. And when the duck dies, even death saddens him as he remembers that such is life. (For those who haven't read it, I'll leave the "tulip" in the title as another lure.)

The point is that good stories about death, like these, may help us illuminate a different, better way of living.