def can relate to the looped thinking around dying and what the fuck does it mean. remember being a kid, i think 7 years old, and realizing all my family members were gonna die and having night terrors for about a month. very heavy stuff and as a kid, no toolkit to battle through it in the dead of night. death monsters coming out and shit. felt physically painful and inescapable, had weird open eyed hallucinatory image of a black and white hourglass and as the grains of sand ticked down they were accompanied by this agonized scream in me and outside me all. this shit went on for i dont know a month. not the best way to encounter death. i never took any of it to my parents. not sure it really fucked me up, but if yall are parents, id say you could probably save your kids some potential suffering by talking about it SOMEHOW. but eh, i made it. the thoughts would recur and cause a lot of anxiety over the years, fading in pain/fear-intensity as i got older and just about gone by teens but then again that fear-mode may've just found other topics lol.

having someone engage me on the topic in a reasonable way i think may have helped. so id encourage parents to try. but i think also, it's not so much about what you tell them. you don't have to make shit up. i don't know what experts recommend but id tell them the facts. your uncle is going to die which means you won't be able to see him anymore. and then maybe listen to them compassionately and tell em hey that means its important that we appreciate and love uncle as much as we can while he's here. but no idea, don't have kids. more important to let them know reality, and then be a source of love for them as they process it... is my no-experience guess.

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but for your very hard family situation, could look for a therapist with experience talking with patients who have received diagnoses of terminal illness. lot of therapists deal with death-related matters for people and their families in these situations.

meditation could def help.

but gotta add...maybe not for everyone...but if you are game...shrooms and/or mdma (molly) can do amazing things for this kind of stuck thought-loop dread. can reprogram ya. been good studies with very positive results on both with terminally ill patients dealing with anxiety/depression after diagnosis.

will cost you less $ than therapy, but good to know what you're doing a bit. both have helped me enormously with many different things. saved my damn life, for real. if you wanna know more, lmk. heart goes out to you, peace