No, this isn’t about my recent post about a kid nearly being run over by a train, thanks to the idiot father.
I was listening to a forensic documentary this morning, about the Queen’s coroners in London. In it, one of the death cases was a suicide of a woman in her twenties, in which some official had to speak to the parents of the victim.
And the voiceover repeats a phrase that just irks me everytime I hear it. And as I watch a lot of these types of TV shows, I hear it a lot. “You know, it’s so difficult to talk to the parents in cases like this because when you’re a parent, you expect to be, you know, buried by your children. It isn’t natural for a parent to have to bury a child.”
Excuse me, but nature is all about burying your kids. It’s modern medicine that’s made it a rare occurrence. In the old days, hardly a family was untouched by child mortality.
Shakespeare lost a twelve year old son. Kipling lost a young daughter. Abe Lincoln lost two boys, and Mary Lincoln lost three. Calvin Coolidge lost a sixteen year old son to an infected blister. My own family on my mother’s side lost two pre-pubescent children to disease in the 1920’s. Their names were Richard and Annelise. (Not sure of the spelling on that last one.)
Okay, I know that things are different now, but the history lover in me just hates an inaccurate phrase that constantly comes up when you talk about dead kids. And talk about dead kids comes up more often than you would imagine it does.
Three cheers for modern medicine, expensive as it is. And vaccinate, people!! Don’t be stupid and bring back the epidemics of old.
It was just as hard for the parents back then as it is now. The Roman politician Cicero lost a daughter and later wrote “I wept without ceasing” and “my sorrow defeats all consolation”.
I’ve never heard it phrased as “it’s not natural”.
I’ve only heard it said as “A parent should never have to bury their child.” Which seems to imply more that it’s such a sad, tragic occurrence for a parent that nobody should have to go through that.
To say it’s “not natural” is odd phrasing. It seems to imply more that it’s abnormal, freakish, or irregular. I don’t think that’s something I would ever say to a grieving parent.
The promise of new life that sits squarely on a new babe’s shoulder is not trifling. The people I know who have lost a baby or child say it is the most painful thing they’ve ever dealt with. But, you’re correct. The phrase is over-used.
Yes, I’ve heard “not normal” too, and phrased that way, it doesn’t set my teeth on edge quite so much. By the way, I wouldn’t contradict anyone who used that sentiment while speaking to a grieving parent. I’m not that anal.
When I told my doctor about the death of my son, he said “That’s not the normal order of things.” True in today’s medical world, but far from true in cases of addiction.
Yes, but the “natural” way of losing children in the past was for them to die in infancy or childhood, as your own examples illustrate. It was never normal or typical for elderly parents to have to bury healthy adult children, except perhaps in time of war.
I’ve always understood this cliche to be intended in the sense of “once your children are grown and you’re getting old, you expect that they’ll bury you. It’s not natural for you as the aging parent of a thriving adult to have to bury them”.
Do you think that if you had to bury a child you’d look back and say well, Shakespeare did it?
Shakespeare scholars think he talked about his lost son a lot in his works. Hamnet and Hamlet are unlikely to be a coincidence; they were not common names. Lots of other writers from that period talked with great grief about the loss of their children. It was more common, but it didn’t seem like it was strange to mourn the loss of a child. That’s what we aim for, to have our children live and do well and outlive us. Elephants mourn dead babies. It’s not like it’s weird to mourn a dead child or feel sympathy for people who have.
Nowadays it’s even less common so they’re experiencing something most people don’t.
There might also be a legislative aspect to this, depending on the year it was made. In 2018 there was an act passed: Children’s Funeral Fund for England - GOV.UK That’s about children under the age of 18. But the language in it might have carried over to other judgments.
Note, from that link, that:
The Prime Minister said:
No parent should ever have to endure the unbearable loss of a child – a loss that no amount of time will ever truly heal.
If you’re someone on the internet where the people affected will never see what you say, you can be objective. But to do that in front of a bereaved parent? I doubt you could.
What’s natural and expected is that the next generation will ultimately replace the last. Therefore the child should -in the expected way of things- be burying their parents, not the other way around.
I never said it was strange or weird to mourn a child, or that people in the past didn’t grieve for their lost kids. Hell, the Victorian Era was obsessed with death.
But I do believe death is as natural as birth.
Talk about weird, have you seen Victorian death photo videos on Youtube? They would prop the deceased up and paint eyes on the closed lids. In some of them, they would pose the family around the body, and it’s hard to tell who the dead one is.