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Comment by pjbeam | Hacker News Reader

One of my biggest hopes is to be survived by all of my children. I can't imagine what it's like to bury your child. All the best to the Nadellas :/

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There is a story about this:

An emperor commissioned a work from the greatest calligrapher in the nation. "Make me something auspicious!" was the brief. The calligrapher thought for a moment, then wrote on a banner:

Parents die. Emperor dies. Children die.

The emperor was outraged. "How is this auspicious? It speaks only of death!" The calligrapher was serene. "Emperor, there is nothing more auspicious than for your deaths to occur in the natural order. Would you have wanted to die before your parents? Would you want your children to die before you?

Turkish has an idiom for this:

Loosely translated to: May God give deaths in (natural) order...

I think about this every now and then, and thank god for all i have.

I think the accepted term for a parent who lost their child is Vilomah.

https://dying.lovetoknow.com/ideas-advice-coping-grief/vilom...

Because it is so traumatic, many languages don't have a word for a parent who lost a child. You have Orphans, Widows...

I think, unfortunately, it was so common as to not be notable. People had way more kids, and there was much more infant mortality. Still tragic of course.

> I think, unfortunately, it was so common as to not be notable. People had way more kids, and there was much more infant mortality. Still tragic of course.

More common, perhaps, but I'm not so sure about the not notable part. There are plenty of examples of great grief surrounding the loss of a child. An example that comes to mind from my recent reading is Dostoevsky and "The Brothers Karamazov." The author was experiencing grief from the loss of a 3 year old son and the book rings with it.

However much the past is a different country, it is still populated by humans, same as any today.

The lack of word suggests the opposite, that it was extremely common. Indeed, historically, nearly everyone would have lost a young child, and many people would have lost an older child.

The fact that it was common doesn’t make it less traumatic.

You're missing the point - check out the parent of the comment you're replying to.

And no one suggested that it does.

Everything is relative and our expectations are set by society and what is common. Today, losing a child is pretty uncommon. 3-4 generations ago if was very common. You expected to have 4-10 children and to lose one or two. It wouldn't be a pleasant experience, but I think it's incorrect to say it wasn't less traumatic (you expected it, you lost a lower percentage, etc). To quote Clint Eastwood's character in Gran Torino, "You're geared for it".

Orphans and widows were also important legal categories. Children without a father needed a legal guardian until they turned 18. Married women (at least under British common law) were not separate legal entities from their husbands. So each category needed a defined term. Parents who had lost children were in many cases just "parents", since families were much larger and it was probably the rare large family who had not experienced the death of a young child.

The lack of words suggests the opposite of the opposite: because it was so common (at a societal level), it was so traumatic (at a societal level). So maybe the lack of word suggests it was so traumatic.

That's from Six Feet Under, no?

There's some good poetic value in it, but I don't know if it's actually true. It has more to do with the effect it has for someone's "normal" life cycle, which is why orphan is only applied to children and not adults. And as the sibling comment mentions, it was pretty common in a family of ~5-10 to have at least one child die.

Up until the English language stopped evolving so rapidly, the word for that was "normal".

It wasn't long ago that children commonly weren't named until they survived two years.

Bureaucratic dehumanization is responsible for reinforcing traumas that cultures had already built ways of dealing with. My grandparents' generation reused the names of their children who didn't survive, but today, few couples would consider that with any name they were forced to write on both a birth and death certificate.

Birth and death certificates aren't even close to a fundamental driving force here. As a society we think differently about it, mostly because we don't expect children to die any more since infant/child mortality has drastically reduced.

Depending on how the child dies they might simply be labeled a Failure.

In German we say "verwaiste Eltern" orphaned parents.

For severely disabled children most parents hope to outlive their kids because they know that nobody will give them a parent's love when they are gone, even with Satya Nadella-level money. There have been some (tragic? bittersweet? I don't know) cases where an aging parent of a disabled child kills the child and then kills themselves to ensure that their kid doesn't get institutionalized after they're gone.

> One of my biggest hopes

Nice way to flip "my greatest fear"

When Malaysia Airlines 17 was shot down by Russia, a local part of the story was a couple whose three children were all on the flight.

How do you even go on after that?

Some people turn to religion, others try to find a purpose for it (cause or charity, see Sandy Hook Promise[1]), and sometimes others don't find a way to go on.

[1] https://www.sandyhookpromise.org/who-we-are/about-us/

My neighbour lost her son, daughter in law and all her grandchildren when MH17 was shot down.

She was a kind old lady who used to speak with my young daughter every morning.

As you can imagine, it was a deeply traumatic experience for her.

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