I wanted to explore this idea and try and understand the difference why the death of a child might be thought of differently to the death of a parent. Please be warned that I write this and will use themes and examples that some, including myself, might find difficult. I need to explore these things so will make no apology.
To do this I will begin with my personal thoughts and experiences before moving to a more scholarly approach.
My mother died 4 days before my daughter. She had long term dementia so in a way I make sense of this by thinking that the person I visited, didn’t remember me, and who rarely registered my presence, wasn’t my mother. There was no identifiable traits left which I could connect with how I remembered my mother in ‘life’ or rather in health. My daughter died aged 18 after an 18 month ‘battle’ with cancer. I mark ‘battle’ in quotes as I dislike this term although it is often used. It implies a fight that perhaps the strongest and most positive can win. On the other side of the idea it might be said that those who died somehow didn’t fight hard enough.
How do I remember these two events and how do I compare and contrast these? The deaths themselves were very similar in many ways. Although I wasn’t there at the point of death for my mother, when I visited a day or so before (I am not certain on this period), she was still and calm and quiet. For my daughter that sense of stillness and calm and quiet didn’t come until after she had died as death was the only way to shut down the monstrous uncontrollable pain she was in at the end. I remember her shouting out that, “I wish I was dead”. It took her a long time to die. Or it seemed a long time. Maybe 12 hours? More? I am not exactly sure. I remember the touch of her skin, slick and hot with sweat. I remember being at my mother’s bedside and holding her hand that day before she died. I remember the quality of the light in the room and that my father and one other person was there. For some reason I have no memory of where or exactly when this was.
What strikes me, if I put a little time between these actual events and today, is that the event of death, when the heart stops, is an instant in time very much like a photograph. It is a snapshot. But as humans we don’t deal with just snapshots of time, although I argue, we do deal with compressed elements of time. The things I remember are clouded by emotion. Some things I have no memory of and some things are clear. I remember these events as fragments. In a way, a fragment is exactly what is left after death. A fragment of that person who has died but also a fragment within ourselves who still live. It is impossible for me to explain and convey my own sense of self which encompasses my sense of loss other than as a fragment. A whole life when expressed as a series of fragments becomes a way of compressing time. Art perhaps gives a chance for people to form their own opinions and through that to make my experiences part of their own sense of self. A person in life is complex with hidden thoughts and desires, moods, ambitions, likes and dislikes, memories and fears and hopes. Their tastes in music or literature, film or politics. Their physical presence in how they dress or style their hair. Their emotions which might be shaped by events which touch then whether near or far. Their health and perceived beauty or ugliness and much, much more. All of these are fragments of the self. If then, through my work, I have an idea to take a medical scan (a fragment which says there been some kind of medical investigation), and to this add a sense of place or time or of my perception of that person’s self, this can only ever be a few select fragments. The idea of fragments lends itself very well to the concept of collections which we can gather and arrange and photograph but I must keep in mind that even if I talk of the self of a dead person, they are gone and I have no way to recreate a whole sense of self. Even if I was to ask a scientist to take a strand of hair to extract the DNA and then clone a person, quite apart from the cruelty of recreating a person with a genetic condition which might well mean they would die young, it could never be the same person with the same self.
As I was writing this I thought of the war in the Yemen or in the Ukraine and of bombs detonating. Fragmentation in those examples is of the bomb itself, the pieces of metal breaking into shards and then drive with explosive force into whatever they meet. It is also the fragmentation of what has been bombed. The buildings, cars, the people. There is another part which is with ideas and concepts and experiences. The bomb and it’s effect might have a psychological impact to the soldiers doing the bombing and those being bombed, which might fragment the psyche. If I visited such a place and picked up a fragment of broken brick or a piece or torn clothing or if time had passed and I found a dried bone fragment, how could I possibly extrapolate from whatever fragment I find everything that had been?
Back to my original question and the difference between the death of a child and that of a parent, it is clear that my perceptions here are never going to be a complete sense of truth but are just fragments of a greater whole. With my example of the bomb, it is clear that my own perceptions will have been altered by the psychological impact of these events. It is almost as if despite how far back we stand, we can never quite get the whole image into the frame.
One obvious difference between the death of a child and a parent is highlighted during the funeral. A parent has lived longer so there is more to say about their life. A child dying means that the things that might be said of a parent such as speaking of their children, their work colleagues, how they might have enjoyed travel, the great loves of their lives, are all ‘what might have beens’. The child has a potential. In physics I am reminded of kinetic and potential energy. A ball rolled to the top of a hill has a stored or potential energy ready to be released. When released, this potential energy becomes kinetic energy seen as movement and also noise and heat. The parent has used up their kinetic energy gathering experiences on the way down that hill while the child sits at the top wondering what might be to come. For some reason the loss of potential is more emotionally challenging to us and we can perhaps better deal with the death of a parent with the phrase, ‘they lived a good life.’
The loss of a child is a very difficult thing for a parent to deal with. It upsets a natural balance where our children should outlive us. The intensity of the emotions around such loss lead to complex traumatic grief reactions. (Prigerson et al., 1999) These grief reactions are so strong that Prigerson contends that traumatic grief constitute a distinct syndrome. This syndrome is similar to post traumatic stress disorder. American Counseling Association says that “PTSD is about fear, and grief is about loss. Traumatic grief will have both”. (Phillips, 2021) Phillips goes on to describe that in some circumstances involving the loss of a child, parents might not want to clear the sense of loss or trauma because this might create “a sense of leaving their loved one behind and moving on” (Phillips, 2021) Tied to the mental stresses, research has shown that bereaved parents of deceased children are at increased risk serious physical outcomes such as suicide, marriage breakup, depression, general health problems, weakened immune system, increased mortality due to increases in smoking or drinking and due to stress which might result in cancers. (Rogers et al., 2008)
I wonder if this syndrome thought to be similar to PTSD is a modern thing or if it has always existed? For example, in Victorian times when infant mortality was much higher than today. In 1850s Scotland, infant mortality was 120 per 1,000 live births. (Knox, 2019) The figure today is 3.98 per 1,000 live births (Information Services Division, 2014) How did people from our past cope with the loss of a child?
A very interesting opinion on this comes from a paper “Eternal Innocence: The Victorian Cult of the Dead Child” written by Mary Gryctko. Her paper argues that in the Victorian era, childhood was idealised as a time of things such as innocence, freedom, helplessness which were fixed through how Victorian society viewed the dead child. She argues that “excessive mourning for dead children in the Victorian era functioned not only as an expression of sorrow for the loss of a particular child but also as a celebration and confirmation of the figure of “the child” as a distinct category of humanity, and bearer of human value. Child death worked alongside eugenicist politics to establish and preserve an image of the ideal child as white, “innocent,” and in need of protection. My chapters examine the figure of the ideal Victorian dead child in both fiction and memoir, while also drawing attention to the many dead children whose childhoods and deaths are erased because they do not fit this ideal.” (Gryctko, 2020)
Children who did not fit the ideal were imbued with adult characteristics and terminology such as “prostitute” or “murderer”. While I do not agree with Gryctko’s main point about about excessive mourning as I think about the vast number of childhood deaths and wonder whether Gryctko picks a few wealthier examples. I also have my doubts about her idea that innocence, freedom, helplessness were fixed through how Victorian society viewed the dead child. But these points aside, this is a fascinating glimpse into a world which I assumed many people were airbrushed from, leaving behind no trace. Photography and art in general, it seems to me, have been heavily involved in this airbrushing. How were women photographed and recorded? And what of the poor? I have never considered before that children are another portion of society which have little record made of them and are rarely given a voice. It is certainly clear that Victorian attitudes to death and remembrance were different from attitudes today as seen by their photographs of the deceased sometimes in a family setting posed with other live children or family members. Interesting to consider why this practice is no longer in vogue. Maybe the logic here is that who would want to remember a family member in death rather than in life?
One other difference between modern times and the past that I have noticed from visiting graveyards is that there is little sign of child’s graves from the past. The children might be buried on a family plot with their names carved onto a gravestone of their mother or father. In modern graveyards, children’s graves are much more common and often decorated with photographs of the deceased and with objects such as children’s toys.
References
Gryctko, M. (2020) ‘Eternal Innocence: The Victorian Cult of the Dead Child’, UNIVERSITY OF PITTSBURGH.
Information Services Division (2014) ‘Scottish Perinatal and Infant Mortality and Morbidity Report’, ISD Scotland.
Knox, W. W. (2019) ‘A history of the Scottish People: Health in Scotland 1840-1940’, SCRAN Learning, Culture, Heritage, pp. 1–8. Available at: http://www.scran.ac.uk/scotland/pdf/SP2_4Housing.pdf.
Phillips, L. (2021) Untangling trauma and grief after loss, Counseling Today, American Counseling Association. Available at: https://ct.counseling.org/2021/05/untangling-trauma-and-grief-after-loss/ (Accessed: 16 April 2022).
Prigerson, H. G. et al. (1999) ‘Consensus criteria for traumatic grief A preliminary empirical test Background Studies suggest that’, British Journal of Psychiatry, Jan(174), pp. 67–73. Available at: https://www.cambridge.org/core, (Accessed: 16 April 2022).
Rogers, C. H. et al. (2008) ‘Long-Term Effects of the Death of a Child on Parents’ Adjustment in Midlife’, National Institute of Health NIH. Available at: http://lithiumwithdrawal.com/lithium-side-effects/long-term-effects-of-lithium/.