Blake
April 11, 2012, 6:54am
41
Nava:
But for most of humanity’s history, 18 was not the limit between childhood and adulthood. Losing a child who has had children is, for many people, not as bad as losing one who has not; the grandchild will care for you/inherit the property/etc. RickJay ’s definition skews one way, yours skews the other.
A ten year old is very unlikely to have had children.
Nava
April 11, 2012, 7:39am
42
And when and where has a 10yo been considered an adult? A 15yo OTOH, yes.
Only if you’re using these words in their specialized biological senses. By a plain interpretation of the words, a one-legged man is neither a biped nor a tetrapod.
Blake
April 11, 2012, 8:22am
44
Exactly.
Nope.
biped
tetrapod
Standard dictionary defintions.
Nava
April 11, 2012, 8:32am
45
What “exactly”? You’re the one who counted anybody under 18 as a child!
Is a one-legged man an animal? Yep. Does he have two feet? Nope. Seems to fail a plain reading of the definition for me. Seems some amputees are of the same mind; since you’re the arbiter of the semantics of this particular word, why don’t you go tell them they’re using it incorrectly?
Zamander:
That is perhaps an exaggeration. While it is true, that infant mortality was greater for the majority of human history, it does not follow that people were somehow not affected by it. And anyways, infant immortality varied depending on diseases and other factors, I’ve read that infant mortality of 15 % was not rare and in that case, it is likely that loss of multiple children was not as universal.
There’s no doubt that their reactions might differ from ours and perhaps some people were even numb to it, but this is not say that everybody was. Your example of Romans probably refers to the idea they had that a responsible pater familias had to kill deformed or weak infants. It was a sign of weakness and effeminateness to fail to do so. This does not mean that they all did it or that they weren’t distraught by the death of initially healthy infants.
Also the Roman letters do not mention the mothers opinion in this and as mothers have a natural tendency to love the offspring they have put so much effort in, it would be hard to think that they wouldn’t grieve.
An essay by Michel de Montaigne mentions that he does not remember how many children he has alltogether, because some died as infants, which is a point for your argument, though not proof of any universal sentiment. But the same essay describes the grief of parents who have lost an older child, which you seem to ignore in your post. Surely a parent who had healthy children from 15 to 25 would be crushed if they were killed, no matter what the historical period is.
In the Iliad, the epic reaches an emotional climax when king Priam humbles himself before Achilleus so that he could have his son Hector’s body and give it a proper burial. He seems to grieve a lot which would give us cause to suspect that Homer would not agree with you. What about Lear grieving his daughter?
So to summarize, if someone would lose all his children, he might not care as much if they are very young, but they would still be horrified, in the young childs case the mother perhaps more given the gender roles in past times. If the children are adolescents or adults, the loss is as horrible to both.
It would seem that the situation would warrant its own word, but perhaps the reason there is not one is that both orphan and widow define a certain position as it comes to family in that orphan does not have parents and lacks their protection and perhaps often their material help, being in a weaker postion as a child than others. Similarly a widow is someone who is not adolescent in the sense of un-married(as often marriage is seen as the true sign of adulthood), is not a bachelor or old maid, but is also still in the game.
The Icelandic skald and viking Egil Skallagrimsson wrote a poem expressing his grief over his sons’ deaths in the 11th century; *Sonatorrek *(“The Irreparable Loss Of Sons”) One of his sons drowned in a storm and another had died of a fever slightly earlier.