How "Ocarina of Time" Helped My Son Understand Grief

Two years ago, my mom died suddenly from a glioblastoma. Since then, my son has struggled to make sense of losing his Nana, though not always in ways I knew how to recognize at the time.

That has been one of the harder parts of watching him grieve. It did not always look like sadness, and it did not always come out as tears or big questions. Sometimes it was quiet, tucked behind the ordinary parts of childhood, only showing up later in the middle of a normal day when I was not expecting it and did not immediately understand what I was seeing.

For a child, death can sit in the background for a long time. They may understand that someone is gone and that they will not see them again, while still not fully understanding what that absence means. Months or even years later, something can bring those questions forward again in a way that catches you off guard.

For my son, that something was The Legend of Zelda: Ocarina of Time.

I started playing it with him a few months ago because it was a game I loved when I was around his age. My mom let me rent it from Blockbuster and my brother and I stayed up all night playing it. I wanted to share that joy, wonder, and magic with him: a boy in green, a sword, dungeons, monsters, and songs played on an ocarina.

At first, that was all it seemed to be, but as we played this Mother’s Day (while my wife enjoyed time for herself) I started to realize the story was brushing up against something much deeper than nostalgia. Something that could maybe broach the subject.

Early in Ocarina of Time , Link tries to save the Great Deku Tree, a giant, ancient tree who watches over the forest. The tree has been cursed, and Link goes inside of him to fight what is hurting him. He defeats Queen Gohma and does what he was asked to do, yet even after all of that, the Great Deku Tree still dies.

That part stayed with me because it is one of the hardest truths about loss. Sometimes love is there, effort is there, hope is there, people try, doctors try, families pray, and the person still dies. That is hard enough for adults to accept, and for a child, it can feel impossible.

Later in the game, when Link returns as an adult, he finds the Deku Tree Sprout growing where the Great Deku Tree had been. It is not the same tree, not a replacement, and not some easy undoing of what happened before. It is something small and alive growing in the place where something great had been lost.

I think that image mattered to my son. It did not make Nana’s death less real, and it did not bring her back. It simply gave him another shape for the question. Maybe, whether he realized it or not, the sprout also gave him a way to think about me.

One day, I will not be here either. That is a hard thing to write, and it is an even harder thing to imagine him having to understand. Part of being a parent is knowing that the love you give your child is meant to outlive you. The things I teach him, the stories we share, the way I speak to him, the way I love him, and even the games we play together become part of him in ways I may never fully see.

Nana could never be replaced, neither will I when my time comes. Still, I hope my son comes to understand that the people who love us can become part of us, not as a substitute for their presence, but as something we carry forward.

As we kept playing, another part of the story seemed to reach him too. Link awakens the Sages, characters who seem to leave ordinary life behind in order to become something greater. Whether the game means they literally die is not really the point. What mattered was how my son understood it. To him, the Sages had to pass through something like death in order to become what they were meant to become.

They were gone, yet they were not erased. They could no longer return to life as it had been, yet they still mattered. They still helped. They still had purpose. They were separated from the world, but their presence continued in another form.

At that point, the questions about Nana were not buried anymore.

He was not only asking about the Great Deku Tree, and he was not only asking about the Sages. He was asking about her. Can someone leave and still matter? Can someone die and still be part of the story? Is death only an ending, or is it also a kind of change? Can someone be gone and still somehow present?

As a parent, I wanted to give him answers that were clear and comforting. That is the instinct. You want to protect your child from the full weight of loss, and you want to say the right thing, the healing thing, the thing that settles every fear. On Mother’s Day, though, I was not only answering as his father. I was answering as a son.

I was trying to help him understand the loss of Nana while still carrying the loss of my mom. I was trying to explain death while still living with the hole it had left in my own life. That is one of the hardest parts of parenting through grief. You do not get to be fully healed before helping your child. Sometimes you are explaining the very thing you are still trying to recover from.

I’ve found so far that children often process grief in non-direct ways. They do it through play, through stories, through drawings, and through repeated questions or phrases that seem to come out of nowhere. For weeks after Nana passed my son would say to me “Nana died.” It was heartbreaking for both of us but it was still so raw for me, and I knew he was just trying to make sense of it. However sometimes those questions need a little distance before they can be spoken at all.

He did not have to start by saying, “I miss Nana.” He could ask about the Great Deku Tree, the sprout, the Sages, and whether they were dead, changed, or somewhere else. Through those questions, he could begin working through what he had been carrying for two years, not all at once and not with clean answers, but in the same way we moved through the game together: one room, one puzzle, one question, and one small act of courage at a time.

Nana’s death was not made easier by a video game. I would never reduce it to that. Her absence is real, his sadness is real, my grief is real, and the ache of someone missing from the family is real.

My mom is not here the way I want her to be, and Nana is not here the way my son wants her to be. Yet there we were, sitting together, playing a game that makes me remember my mom fondly, moving through a story about loss, courage, memory, and return.

For my son, this story had temples, Sages, songs, a great tree, a small sprout, and a boy named Link. Underneath all of that, though, it was really about Nana for us both.

Always be learning.