Where Did Gran Go?

When the author's mother died in 1994, her three young daughters lost a loving grandmother. As the author struggled to explain this loss to her daughters and fruitlessly searched for children's books that adequately addressed a child's perspective of death, the seed for this book was planted. The beginning of the book describes the loving relationship between the grandmother and her three young granddaughters. The girls are excited to see their Gran when she visits each summer. She plays dress-up with them, teaches them how to play card games, walks with them to pick flowers for their mother, reads them bedtime stories, sings them lullabies, and plays with them at the beach. One day, the girls see that their mother is crying. When they ask her why, she tells them that her mother, their grandmother, has died. The girls have many questions, but the hardest one for the mother to answer is, "Where did Gran go?" Throughout the rest of the book, the mother struggles to answer this question in a way that her daughters can understand. Finally, after a day at the beach where the mother is strongly missing her own mother and the times they all spent together, she reads her daughters a bedtime story, sings them the lullaby their Gran used to sing to them, and announces, "I know where Gran went. The book portrays the physical likenesses (the eldest daughter has the grandmother's red hair and the two youngest have her blue eyes) and the loving relationships between three generations of a family as it follows a woman and her children navigating the loss of the girls' grandmother. This beautifully illustrated and sensitively written book explores the topic of death in a gentle manner that young children can relate to and understand.