ABSTRACT
Two days before her mother dies of cancer, 8-year-old Susanne starts writing and drawing her thoughts and feelings in a notebook. She calls it Tenkeboka—det blå hjertet (The thinking book—the blue heart). Over the next year, Susanne uses the notebook as a private space to write and draw her memories and feelings of sadness, anger, love and hope. The book was only meant for Susanne and no adults were involved in its making, but it was later published—true to its format, as a notebook—to help other children in similar situations. Taking departure in Susanne’s thinking book, this article aims to think alongside Susanne, exploring what death and bereavement might look like from one child’s perspective in Norway, through her words and drawings. Inspired by theoretical and methodological approaches from childhood studies, death studies and anthropology, I explore entanglements of childhood, culture, relationality and multiple ontology in an analysis aiming to cultivate epistemic pluralism and an ethics of unknowing when exploring death and bereavement from a child’s perspective.