Well, I’ll answer the OP with a real-life anecdote, but unlike the others here there’s no “whew” moment or happy ending. I admit it’s also not about leaving a child in a car, but it is about a parent who made a fatal mistake in judgment.
In the 1960s (early season Mad Men territory), my parents, having grown up in Brooklyn tenements as the children of immigrants, were now, thanks to my father’s increasingly successful business, suddenly middle class. As such, they did what many people of their generation and new status did: they went for the full suburban lifestyle. Long Island single-family home, large lawn for Pop to mow on weekends, and an above-ground pool for their two kids: my brother (10) and sister (6). (I wasn’t born yet.)
A couple of days after my mom’s birthday, my father was at work and my mom was naturally doing the stuff young housewives of those days did–laundry, cleaning, and keeping the kids who were now around the house all day (aside from when they were playing with neighbor kids) out of her hair.
One note: my mom was loving and overprotective, like many Jewish moms (or non-Jewish, for that matter), and thought the sun rose and set for her children, would do anything she could for them if it were in her power. Just want to make sure that’s stated and underlined. Anyone who claims what happened next was intentional is going to get pitted and pitted like you’ve never been pitted before.
That July day, she watched her kids get into the pool, my sister as usual not budging from the side (it was shallow enough for even a six-year-old to stand), my brother swimming and diving and playing undersea explorer games or whatever an early 1960s boy would’ve done. He was an excellent swimmer, had medals and so on. My sister couldn’t yet swim, which is why she usually stayed by the edge.
Anyway, from what I understand, my mom was as usual watching them for a while, but something called her attention away. A phone call? A shift in the laundry cycle? I have no idea, because this day is something that was never ever spoken about while I grew up. All I know is that before she went into the house, she told her smart, ultimately responsible son to watch out for his sister.
This kind of “letting the kids play by themselves” mentality was pretty typical of parents in those days. Again going back to Mad Men, there were a few scenes of Betty getting annoyed to see her daughter Sally wrapped in a plastic dry cleaning bag not because the girl was in danger of suffocation, but because she might have dumped the clothes somewhere and gotten them wrinkled.
Anyway. The rest is culled from a police report and the very vague memories of the only witness to what happened next.
For the next five- to ten-minutes, my sister watched my brother playing around, swimming about under water, being rough-and-tumble and probably scaring her annoyingly because that’s what big brothers do. At some point he went underwater and splashed around for a while, probably pretending to be someone like Jacques Cousteau. But after a while he didn’t emerge. He was just splashing his legs under the water. My sister started yelling at him to stop scaring her.
My mother heard the yells and ran out of the house to find her son had caught his arms or leg or head–I’m not sure which, I don’t remember the police report)–in the rungs of the small pool ladder. Mom immediately jumped into the pool, extricated her child, and dragged his now-motionless body to the grass. She then grabbed my sister out as well, told her to stay put, and then tore through the yard desperately yelling for help but clearly knowing it was too late.
Neighbors later reported to the police that they heard her screaming over and over, “He’s dead! My son is dead!” My sister remembers holding her brother’s head, seeing his blue face, and still vaguely thinking he was tricking her.
The police and doctors arrived, and my mother was described as hysterical. Not long after, my father got a call at work from one of their family friends to come home immediately. No other information. When he arrived, he learned he no longer had a son.
To answer the OP’s question, how did parents react to a tragedy they inadvertently caused? In my mom’s case, she never recovered completely nor forgave herself, and fully expected to have some kind of karmic punishment (as if losing her son wasn’t enough) for her negligence. A happy young suburban family became encased in grief and guilt and unspoken shame.
I don’t know how my parents stayed married after that; how did Pop not blame Mom for what happened? The very, very few times he and I ever spoke on this topic (when I was in my 30s), he actually blamed himself for deciding to get the pool in the first place, and he wept over the fact that Mom never forgave herself. He still would not, could not, blame her aloud.
Going back to the immediate aftermath: my father and mother took my sister to a child psychiatrist after the incident–somehow they were psychologically aware enough to know she might be traumatized (and she was, but only years later did it manifest itself as severe survivor’s guilt). But of course they never went themselves. (In their circle it wasn’t done.) Nowadays there’d be support groups urged on them, but they didn’t have that sort of system back then. So there was no real outlet or understanding of what steps they might take to start, somehow, recovering. The only advice, tacit most like, was “move on, have more kids, don’t speak of this lest you bring up bad memories.”
They had two more daughters, with me as the last born almost exactly three years later. This is all hindsight knowledge, by the way, because not only was this incident not discussed while I was growing up, my brother was never discussed. I never even knew I had one until I was about 10 myself, and even then my mother told me he died from being hit by a car. (Ostensibly to make sure I wasn’t afraid of water myself, but as an adult I’ve become more aware that this was also a story told because Mom was terrified to be asked the inevitable question: “But where were you, mommy?”)
Mom suffered from depression and didn’t take care of herself. She became overprotective to the nth degree of her surviving daughter and the two daughters she had after the accident. Hell, I wasn’t allowed to take a bath alone until I was 10, and even after that the rule was that I had to sing and make noise the whole time so my mother could hear me from her bedroom.
Actually, it was my failure to do so one evening when I was about 12 that led me to learn the truth. When she couldn’t hear me, she burst into the bathroom, wild-eyed, and then yelled at me for not making enough noise. I was probably a bit snarky and rolled my eyes, saying something like, “I’m a big girl, Mom, what’s the big deal already?” And she blurted out in a vicious voice I’d never, ever heard from her before: “My son drowned!” Then, horrified by what she said and probably shaken to the core, she left the room. I quietly sat there, stunned, and then silently let the water out of the tub, got into my pajamas, and went to my sister (the closer one in age; my oldest sister was in college by then) to ask what Mom had meant by that. She told me, and finally I knew the real story. And felt like a horrible horrible daughter for invoking this kind of memory in my mother. As if not knowing were my fault, or as if I even needed to “invoke” the memory–like she didn’t live with it every day.
The bizarre unspoken rule of silence in my family, the secrecy and the fear of causing my mother more grief and guilt were so strong that afterward I never went to my mom to ask any questions or apologize or do whatever would’ve probably been natural after such a confrontation. And she, in what I will admit was a really bad decision on her part, didn’t seek me out later, sit me down, and explain her words either. I kind of understand this, even though I think it was absolutely the wrong way to behave. I just think she felt that kids should trust their parents and think them wise, and she probably was afraid I’d never trust her again, or would look down on her, or maybe in her worst nightmares would hate her for killing the brother I never knew.
As I said, she seemed to live the rest of her life waiting for the hammer of fate to punish her. She didn’t help by smoking too much, not going to the doctor, and rarely going out to enjoy life. Pop, for his part, tried to encourage Mom to go out with him on weekends. He had a vastly different POV from her. He was a survivor and didn’t want his kids to be afraid of life, so he pushed us (rather obnoxiously, I say with love) to do things I personally was terrified to do, such as diving or even just learning to swim or skiing. As I said, my mom was overprotective and watchful to a fault with her youngest children, not surprisingly, and I pretty much learned by osmosis that the world was a scary place, that water was deadly (and this was even before I knew about my brother’s mode of death), that not being by your mom’s side or telling her exactly where you go and what you were doing was the express train to horrible disaster of some unspecified kind.
I grew up believing my Mom’s perspective. To me, my father was reckless. I even thought he was willfully putting my life at risk by forcing me to try to learn how to swim. (Totally backwards thinking, right?)
She never went to visit my brother’s grave. I don’t think I ever heard her mention his name. I know she discussed him with my oldest sister, who knew him, because my sister had some psychological problems related to his death and her guilt for not saving him or even knowing that he was in trouble (at age six!). But my mom just couldn’t bear bringing up that day. It ate her up inside.
Meanwhile, Mom became semi-obsessed with smoothing our way through life. I was afraid of nursery school? She kept me home so I didn’t have to suffer. (Or learn how to handle myself, but she didn’t think of that.) I was shy and didn’t want to go to camp? I was kept at home. I didn’t have to make phone calls, I had help doing homework, I was allowed to stay home sick quite a lot for very little reason when I faked colds mainly because I hated school (again, very shy and alone). I never planned for the future, was never taught how to plan for the future, probably because my Mom lived her life, and thus taught us how to live ours, assuming that the future was a bad, frightening and utterly unpredictable thing. No point planning for a better life, because one day you’ll turn your head for ten minutes and death will result. Even my father had this aspect in him too, though he had a more hopeful perspective, he too seemed to live life one day at a time–and not in the good sense. They never discussed college plans or career plans with me. In fact, I pretty much grew up not thinking or being able to visualize a future. I couldn’t fathom leaving my mom’s home, so therefore I wasn’t going to college, and thus there was no point planning on going away to school. I was actually shocked when my parents made me go. I picked three schools, none of which I cared about, and got into two. Even then I didn’t think I’d really be going. But somehow I did.
(To this day–and I’m 46 now–I have to fight against the mindset that if I can’t envision something happening down the road, it will never happen. Amazing how far-reaching this death was. As I said, I wasn’t even born when my brother died, never knew him or even of his existence for my first ten years, but I was still affected by the tragedy.)
Finally, when her two younger daughters made it to their teen years, Mom started bit by bit to come out of her cocoon. Maybe because we’d finally gotten past the age my brother was when he died; she may have felt somehow she’d successfully escaped the Punishment. By the time I went off to college at 18 she was starting to find some interests outside of the house.
But when she started feeling ill, she didn’t go to the doctor because she probably suspected the worst. And it was the worst: lung cancer. I can only imagine she thought to herself when the doctor gave her the diagnosis: “At last. It’s happening.” She died seven months later–also in July, like her son–at only 56. I was 19.
I’m sorry for what’s basically a huge article or blog post. But I’m just answering the OP with one anecdote of how a parent reacts when her/his actions lead to an accidental death. Black depression and self-loathing, attempts to overcompensate via protecting other children, inability to trust happiness, such all-encompassing guilt that even the dead child’s name couldn’t be mentioned, and an utter certainty that punishment would be visited upon her, to the point where she hastened it along by passively committing suicide via cigarettes. She was her own judge, jury and, in a way, executioner.
To her, she was primarily the woman who killed her firstborn child. And I’m sure to some of the less-compassionate people in this thread, that’s all she was. But it’s not true. Yes, a beloved young boy died due to her unthinking negligence. But Mom was still a wonderful, beautiful, compassionate, smart, loving, funny, thoughtful, kind person. Her ability to see that died along with her son on July 27, 1963.