On a recent Friday, I swung open the gate to my daughter's school yard. I was expecting to find the usual crowd of mothers milling outside in the garden. But I knew something was dreadfully wrong when a teacher solemnly ushered me toward a full, but silent classroom. Inside, the mothers sat, wiping their eyes and weeping at the news that a pupil and his mother had been hit by a car while cycling to school. The mother had died instantly. The 5-year-old boy was in a coma.

Hiratsuka Yochien is a large nursery school with about 150 students, and I didn't know the mother personally. It would never have occurred to me to go to the funeral. So, it was even more unexpected when the principal announced that all the children in the injured boy's class would go to the funeral in his place. How do you explain death to preschool children, let alone a funeral? What are they ready to hear and witness with their own eyes?

"We explained to the children that because their friend was in the hospital, we would say goodbye and pray for his mother," said the school principal, Michihiko Hiratsuka.