Hacker News Reader

Comment by myth_drannon | Hacker News Reader

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

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.

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.

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.

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".

In German we say "verwaiste Eltern" orphaned parents.

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

Reply on news.ycombinator.com