What Remembrance Sunday teaches children about grief.

My son asked me last Sunday why all the people were crying at the bus stop. He was seven. He had seen someone standing alone, wearing a poppy, looking at nothing in particular, tears on their face. It was the eleventh hour of the eleventh day. I told him what was happening. He thought about it for a long time. Then: 'Are they crying for someone specific?'

Are they crying for someone specific? is one of the most precise questions a seven-year-old has ever asked me. It makes the distinction that matters: between grief that has a name and grief that is collective, shared, directed at an absence so large that no single face can represent it.

Rememblance Sunday — the annual ceremony of communal grief for those killed in war — is one of the few occasions in contemporary life where collective emotional expression is not only permitted but expected. Adults cry in public. The two minutes of silence are observed in shopping centres, on buses, in offices. Children who encounter this for the first time are encountering something they have few cultural tools for: the expression of grief as a collective act, grief directed not at someone they knew but at the idea of loss itself.

How we respond to the question 'why are they crying?' shapes what children understand grief to be. The instinct is often to simplify: 'because some people died a long time ago.' This is true but incomplete. It misses the most important thing: that collective grief is something humans do together as a way of honouring the people we have lost and the losses of people we never knew.