Preparing a toddler for a death in the family?

I’m an only child, so my best friend is my daughter’s “Auntie.”  She doesn’t see Auntie as often as she used to, but when she does, she lights up and Auntie is the only person in the room in her mind.  Auntie has been battling breast cancer for 5 years now and her battle is slowly coming to a close.  She will probably pass sometime between November and February. My daughter is almost 15 months old and has already had a few people disappear from her life without explanation (child-free friends who decided they couldn’t continue a friendship with us post-parenthood and a nanny who decided to not return after having her own son), but she was younger then and I’m not sure she really noticed (and I hope their disappearance didn’t scar her!).  She also has a lot of family that lives far away, so she sees pictures of people a lot (we’re putting together a “family book” for her now with pictures of everyone) but has only met them in person a handful of times.  She sees her paternal grandparents about once every 3 months.  However, this is the first time we’ve had to prepare ourselves to handle death with her. I don’t want my daughter to think of Auntie as just someone else who has left her behind, but I also don’t want to associate her with other family that she’ll get to see every so often.  I also don’t know how I’m personally going to handle her death, or how I’m going to feel talking about it, but since we have this time now to prepare for it, I hope you all can share some wisdom with me about how this works with a toddler? via /r/Parenting http://ift.tt/2g8S0i6