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SPEAKER: More than 7,000 Minnesotans have died of COVID-19 since the pandemic began. Last Sunday, students at Parkside Elementary School in Marshall lost one of their first grade classmates to complications from the disease. She was the third child to die of COVID since the pandemic began. Our reporter Hannah Yang talked to some members of the school community as they navigate their loss and help their children try to make sense of it.

HANNAH YANG: Six-year-old Jase Nelson is a first grader at Parkside Elementary School in Marshall. He and his mom, Michelle Nelson, sat down this week to look at a class picture from last year so Jase could remember one classmate in particular.

JASE NELSON: I played with her last year at recess. She would want to play tag, or she would want to go on the swings with me. She was a little shy. She would like to take pictures. She had lots of friends. She would be nice.

HANNAH YANG: It was a bittersweet memory.

JASE NELSON: I was a little bit crying.

MICHELLE NELSON: What made you cry?

JASE NELSON: When she passed away.

HANNAH YANG: Over the weekend, Jase's classmate from kindergarten, a little girl who was six years old, died from complications of COVID-19. When the heartbreaking announcement came from the school district, Michelle sat Jase down to talk about it. She said he knew something was wrong when he saw the tears in her eyes. Their family had talked about COVID before, but this was really hard for him to grasp.

MICHELLE NELSON: As a mom, it was heartbreaking. To have to talk to your child about losing another child, it's really hard.

HANNAH YANG: Jase was shocked and started asking a lot of questions. Michelle says she did her best to give him some answers, but some of his questions just didn't have any.

MICHELLE NELSON: And then, once it sunk in a little bit more, he would, here and there, ask more questions. You know, like, I thought kids couldn't get sick from COVID? And why did it happen to her?

HANNAH YANG: Another Parkside parent, Anne Veldhuisen walked through many of those same questions with her six-year-old, Martin. As a minister, she has been on the other side of counseling people working through grief.

ANNE VELDHUISEN: Your heart immediately breaks for that child, for that child's parents, for the classmates, and for the teachers. You don't expect to be having this conversation with your six or a seven-year-old about a friend that they've lost.

HANNAH YANG: But she sat down with Martin in the living room and as gently and honestly as she could talked to him about the classmate he had lost.

ANNE VELDHUISEN: And we've been very honest with our kids about what COVID is and what that means for families and in school and out in the world. He asked a little bit about her. He wanted to know if she was scared or if it hurt when she died. You know, questions that you can't answer. So we were just trying to be honest and said, we don't know what she was feeling, but we do know that she was very sick.

HANNAH YANG: Talking about death with her son wasn't new, but this time it hit differently.

ANNE VELDHUISEN: The few times that we have talked frankly about death and dying has been in light of someone we know passing away. And every time until now it has been an older person, someone who is the age of his grandparents or his great grandparents.

And so this one was tricky because it's almost easy as a parent to find comfort in someone's long life, and you can pass that comfort along to your child. And there's no comfort in this particular loss.

HANNAH YANG: Severe cases of COVID-19 in children are still rare, and kids under 15 make up only about 9% of all Minnesota's COVID-19 cases. But research suggests that several new variants of the virus are more transmissible, especially among children. Michael Osterholm is an epidemiologist at the University of Minnesota.

MICHAEL OSTERHOLM: I don't want to diminish the fact that we are not seeing widespread serious illness in young kids. We surely have a number of them that are seriously ill. But they probably typify the very worst in this pandemic in that regard.

HANNAH YANG: That's created a challenge for families as they work to keep their children safe and healthy, Michelle Nelson says.

MICHELLE NELSON: It's traumatizing that it's put into perspective for them that they're at risk too. And they had a classmate and friend and somebody that they knew that was here last week, and she's not there anymore. Do you want to tell her how that made you feel?

JASE NELSON: It made me sad, and it made my heart broke. It made me feel bad.

HANNAH YANG: As she helps Jase navigate the loss of his classmate, Michelle says it's been important to remember that they're also grappling with the frightening effects of this evolving pandemic. With reporting from Catharine Richert, I'm Hannah Yang, NPR News.

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SPEAKER: It's All Things Considered from NPR News.