What do I tell the children?

I don't know what you can tell your children about death, I only know what we told our son Tom when Ruby died. We read about possible approaches to take and told him after a few days, when Ruby didn't come back from her school trip as planned. 
Tom was only two and a half at the time. We told him Ruby had died. She was very ill and had a sick heart which stopped working. We could never see her again but she wasn't sick anymore, she wasn't hungry or in pain.  But it is final. We will always miss her and talk about her. We have lovely memories and photos and home movies but she has gone forever. This is what death is. Mummy, Daddy and Tom have healthy hearts and we will live for a very long time (we can say this with some certainty having had appropriate tests). 
We were careful not to say that she had passed away (where to?) and we were short, to the point, honest and highlighted the finality of death. Although we had no comparison to assist our explanation I know of adults saying "do you remember when our cat died?" or similar. 
We have repeated the issue of finality to him to strengthen his understanding of it (as much as a three year old can understand the finality of it) and have remained aware of changes in his behaviour over time as he appeared very accepting at the start and we were worried he may become sadder.  He is lucky, in a sense, because he is probably old enough to remember Ruby through his life (and his memories can be reinforced by photos, discussions, etc.) but not so old that the loss of his sister will be traumatic for him. I may be wrong, of course, and my training in trauma therapy has shown that children and adults can sometimes develop post-trauma illness many years after the event. As with adults- patience, love, empathy, warmth. Is there any human that doesn't flourish with these things? So far he has been OK. In the early days I caught him trying to Skype her on the computer but now, at three and a half years old, he talks openly about her in the past tense and will, apparently comfortably, mention to others that his sister died. Sometimes he sees us with a tear in our eye and knows we have "watery eyes" because we are thinking about Ruby and so we tell him that we might sometimes be sad because we can't see her again but we are happy when we think of her. 

I hope the link works below. It is Barnardos leaflet on explaining death to a child and is highly recommended. 


http://www.barnardos.org.uk/child_bereavement_booklet_explaining_death.pdf