For most children, this is the first one. The first person they knew and loved who died, the first funeral, the first time anybody has had to say the word to them and mean it. And you are very likely doing it while your own mother or father is the one who died, which is a thing nobody warns you about. It's a shelf: you pick the one that fits, you leave the rest. Any single one of them can be the whole of what your family needs. They differ in two ways that actually matter. Some name the death outright and some hide it behind a metaphor. Some hand your child a heaven and some very deliberately don't. Both of those are yours to choose, so both are written down plainly for every book here, without a nudge either way.
Pick one and stop. Here's how they actually differ, because it's the difference that decides it. On whether the death is said out loud: 'Grandad's Island' never once uses the word — Grandad stays on a beautiful island and the house at the bottom of the garden is empty afterward — which makes it the softest door and also means a literal four-year-old can think he moved house. 'Always Remember' is nearly as soft and puts an animal in the role: Old Turtle takes his last breath on page one and the rest is the sea remembering him. 'The Grandad Tree' says it in words, kindly and straight, that sometimes things die, like trees, like people, like Grandad. 'Nana Upstairs & Nana Downstairs' shows a four-year-old the empty bed and has his mother tell him she's not coming back. 'Saying Good-bye to Grandma' is the one for a funeral on the calendar: it walks a seven-year-old through the funeral home, the casket, the burial and the church buffet, in order. 'Cry, Heart, But Never Break' is the heaviest and the most grown-up, with Death himself at the kitchen table drinking coffee while four children try to keep him from going upstairs. 'The Memory Box' is for later, when the funeral is over and your child has started being scared of forgetting. On the afterlife: only two of these put anything on the other side, and both do it lightly. Nana Upstairs offers a falling star and the word 'perhaps'; Grandad's Island offers an island that the text never claims is real. The other five are secular — the Grandad Tree plants a seed, Old Turtle lives on in what he taught, the Memory Box fills a box, Cry Heart argues that death is what gives life its worth, and Saying Good-bye holds a Christian funeral without ever explaining where Grandma went. Two carry faith in the packaging rather than the story: the Memory Box's back-matter parent guide is written from a Christian perspective, and Saying Good-bye's rituals are a church funeral's. None of them will tell your child something you'd have to take back.