okieinexile
Well-Known Member
By Bobby Neal Winters
The other night might wife went to pick up my daughter at a place where our daughter had told us she would be, and she was not there. Jean is, ordinarily, a mild woman and not given to anger, and yet when she came into the house the phrase, “Where is she?” rattled the pictures on the walls. We contacted our daughter on the cell phone that she hadn’t used to tell us where she was going and found that she was safe and sound. Jean’s anger abated somewhat after that. Anger can be a channel for fear. We love our children and live in fear that they ever would be harmed.
I cannot imagine the death of one of my children. Even the writing of that sentence caused tears to well into my eyes. There is a natural order to things, and when a child dies before the parent, it reverses that natural order. This is true especially today when medical science has shielded us from the ravages child mortality wrought on our forebears in previous generations and still does in other parts of the world.
This is not as distant from us as we might think. My Grandma Winters was the youngest of 12 children, only 8 of which survived beyond infancy. She herself had five children, and while all of them lived well into adulthood and had children themselves, she outlived all but two of her own children. My brother and I were her youngest grandsons, and when my Aunt Sis passed-away, my brother and I each held an elbow as grandma walked forward to view the body. Then in her nineties, she looked into the casket and said, "That's my baby girl."
My Uncle Dave, now almost 86, tells the story about his own uncle, Tunce. Tunce and his wife had lost a child in infancy. They lowered the tiny coffin into the ground, and as they were too poor to buy a stone marker, Tunce carved a "W", for "Winters", on one end of a one-by-four and drove the other end into the ground. By God's Grace and the advances of medicine, the current generation of my family has been spared this.
We've lost from our collective experience the knowledge of how to cope with the loss of a child, or maybe what we’ve lost is the knowledge there is no way to cope.
In such times, we look to the ancient wisdom found in the Bible. Here, we need to be careful as to where we look. The warrior Jephthah, in the book of Judges, offered his favorite daughter as a human sacrifice because of a rash oath he had made. Better comfort is found in the story of David.
When David's wife Bathsheba lost the child, who had been conceived in their adultery, David consoled her and gave her another child. When his son Absalom is killed while rebelling against him, David mourns aloud saying, "Absalom, Absalom, would that I had died instead." Even a for King, even in a time when the death of a child was common, even when the child was in violent rebellion, the pain of the death of a child was total. We would choose death ourselves rather than lose one of our children.
In the Christian tradition, we can put our pain with God's pain at the death of his Son on a cross; if we cannot imagine God in pain, then we can think of Mary at the foot of the Cross. But our pain will always be there. It is like a large rock with sharp edges in a field. Weeds and rocks and vines grow up around it and hide it from us, but occasionally we run into in again and cut ourselves on it. It is still there, still as big and sharp as ever. At least I suppose that it is. That is the way it is with my father's death.
How much harder would be the death of a child than the death of a parent? How much sharper that loss? I've never lost a child. And saying so brings fear to my heart. The love of our children is so deep, so primal, that it is entwined with superstition. Will my boasting of good fortune bring down a curse upon me? I don’t want to ever know.
The other night might wife went to pick up my daughter at a place where our daughter had told us she would be, and she was not there. Jean is, ordinarily, a mild woman and not given to anger, and yet when she came into the house the phrase, “Where is she?” rattled the pictures on the walls. We contacted our daughter on the cell phone that she hadn’t used to tell us where she was going and found that she was safe and sound. Jean’s anger abated somewhat after that. Anger can be a channel for fear. We love our children and live in fear that they ever would be harmed.
I cannot imagine the death of one of my children. Even the writing of that sentence caused tears to well into my eyes. There is a natural order to things, and when a child dies before the parent, it reverses that natural order. This is true especially today when medical science has shielded us from the ravages child mortality wrought on our forebears in previous generations and still does in other parts of the world.
This is not as distant from us as we might think. My Grandma Winters was the youngest of 12 children, only 8 of which survived beyond infancy. She herself had five children, and while all of them lived well into adulthood and had children themselves, she outlived all but two of her own children. My brother and I were her youngest grandsons, and when my Aunt Sis passed-away, my brother and I each held an elbow as grandma walked forward to view the body. Then in her nineties, she looked into the casket and said, "That's my baby girl."
My Uncle Dave, now almost 86, tells the story about his own uncle, Tunce. Tunce and his wife had lost a child in infancy. They lowered the tiny coffin into the ground, and as they were too poor to buy a stone marker, Tunce carved a "W", for "Winters", on one end of a one-by-four and drove the other end into the ground. By God's Grace and the advances of medicine, the current generation of my family has been spared this.
We've lost from our collective experience the knowledge of how to cope with the loss of a child, or maybe what we’ve lost is the knowledge there is no way to cope.
In such times, we look to the ancient wisdom found in the Bible. Here, we need to be careful as to where we look. The warrior Jephthah, in the book of Judges, offered his favorite daughter as a human sacrifice because of a rash oath he had made. Better comfort is found in the story of David.
When David's wife Bathsheba lost the child, who had been conceived in their adultery, David consoled her and gave her another child. When his son Absalom is killed while rebelling against him, David mourns aloud saying, "Absalom, Absalom, would that I had died instead." Even a for King, even in a time when the death of a child was common, even when the child was in violent rebellion, the pain of the death of a child was total. We would choose death ourselves rather than lose one of our children.
In the Christian tradition, we can put our pain with God's pain at the death of his Son on a cross; if we cannot imagine God in pain, then we can think of Mary at the foot of the Cross. But our pain will always be there. It is like a large rock with sharp edges in a field. Weeds and rocks and vines grow up around it and hide it from us, but occasionally we run into in again and cut ourselves on it. It is still there, still as big and sharp as ever. At least I suppose that it is. That is the way it is with my father's death.
How much harder would be the death of a child than the death of a parent? How much sharper that loss? I've never lost a child. And saying so brings fear to my heart. The love of our children is so deep, so primal, that it is entwined with superstition. Will my boasting of good fortune bring down a curse upon me? I don’t want to ever know.
to you, okieinexile.