LAST night, on the very cusp of falling asleep, my three-year-old daughter Isla asked me two questions – “Do babies die?” and “Do little girls die?”.

This has come, we think, from the recent death of one of our cats. Isla was very fond of Perry, so her death was not something we could easily brush under the carpet.

Rightly or wrongly, we let Isla see Perry the morning after she died (she died very peacefully in her sleep at the grand old age of 16) and give her a little stroke to say goodbye.

This was Isla’s first experience of death and her subsequent questions have left me feeling a little bit helpless.

It’s left Isla very curious to know more about a subject I feel she is too little to digest.

There is a bit of a subtext here. When she was two, Isla developed retinoblastoma, a rare cancer which only affects small children.

Mercifully, it is easy to cure if caught in time but there were consequences. Isla lost an eye to the disease and has had many general anaesthetics.

She has dealt with all this with incredible ease and is now a very happy little girl. But the constant hospital appointments and strange men shining bright lights in her eyes made her anxious. Not overly so – she sleeps like a log most nights – but she started biting her nails at an unusually young age.

We put this down to the whole eye thing and, now that she’s interested in painting her nails like mummy, the biting has stopped.

But now I’m concerned that this death obsession is going to make her worried again.

My wife’s view is that if she is old enough to be asking these questions then she is old enough to know the answers to them. But I’m not sure it’s that straightforward.

I read a piece a few months ago in which a girl a couple of years older than Isla was told, by her grandmother, that her mum had died. They knew this job was going to have to be done, the mum had terminal cancer, and, when the time came, they did it.

The little girl spent a few seconds seemingly absorbing the information before running out to get back on her trampoline and excitedly asking for a sandwich.

In other words – she didn’t understand. The magnitude of what she had been told was too great for her to grasp.

How do you even start explaining death to a girl whose three priorities in life are Lazytown, bouncing up and down and the colour pink and its proliferation throughout as much of her home as possible?

How do you tell her that she will eventually end up either rotting in a hole in the ground or her remains will be incinerated and cast to the four winds? That she could die tomorrow or she could die in a hundred years? That, the chances are, she’ll have to deal with her mummy and daddy dying?

How do you do that? It’s not something I ever want to think about, never mind explain to her.

On the one hand, it’s not fair to ignore her question and distract her with a bag of crisps. On the other, I can’t find a way to talk to her about this.

At three, all you know is life. None of the things we do to prepare for death – wills, life insurance, paying attention to those awful June Whitfield ‘you will die soon, sign up now for a free carriage clock’ ads – are relevant and neither are the things we do to try to delay it – dieting, exercise, plastic surgery.

A three-year-old’s frames of reference are so far removed from any of that so why do they need to know about the end of their life?

I’m utterly confused and feel bad that I can’t answer Isla’s really rather fundamental questions for fear of frightening her.

And all of this before she’s even mentioned boys.