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Comment by david-gpu | Hacker News Reader

I did not know she outlived both of her children. I can't imagine how terrible that must be. RIP.

Parents should never, ever, burry their children. There is nothing in this world I am truly afraid of, apart from this. I know it would break me, irrepairably, and make me a shadow of myself.

Respect and deepest sympathies to anybody who went through that, and found will to continue life as much as possible.

That first line of your post is such a spot-on description of what I - and supposedly many other parents - have felt ever since I've had children. It's also something I believe you cannot quite grasp until you've become a parent yourself.

Do you think it would be different for a parent in their 90's to see one of their kids die at 67?

why would that be? they're still your kids

Distance? I only have young, pre-teen kids, but based on my own relationships with my parents, the closeness we once had has shifted to my "new" immediate family. I expect there will come a time with my own kids where we're just not as "close" as we once were. I wonder if that has any impact on how some people process grief (it seemed to, from witnessing aunts/uncles who died before my grandparents, and how they processed it).

I can also add that a lot of my anxiety around the sudden loss of the child is the thought of their life being cut short. Everything that they could have experienced, all the potential -- gone. Sure, when you're in your 60's you still have lots of life left to live, but the weight of life being "cut too short" just doesn't seem like it'd feel as heavy as say, the death of a child, teen, or a young adult in their early 20's.

My Mum visited her Dad maybe once a week at most, but even in his 80s, whenever she visited he'd make her favourite sandwiches, try to give her money, take care of her car. She died in hospital, and he was holding her hand telling her she would be ok. It totally broke him - he had a series of strokes causing his dementia to worsen quickly, and he died within a year.

Obviously not true of every parent-child relationship, but when it is true, it hurts.

Knowledge that they weren't taken as a child, that they got to experience a fuller life.

No. A loss of a child is a loss of a child. I have heard people say that parents of 4 or 5 children should feel less of a loss if one of their children dies, than a parent who only has one or two children. It just doesn't work that way.

really just depends on the person.

A couple within my extended family had to bury their daughter who contracted breast cancer in her mid-30s.

The daughter died around 15 years ago and any mention of her makes her father well up in tears. The father occasionally says he's ready to die and be with his daughter in the afterlife.

His wife isn't too happy about him saying such things. I just mention it to show just how much it has hurt him, and he wishes to be with his daughter .

As a father of young children I occasionally think about how I would feel if I lost one of my children. I usually don't go too far down that line of thinking before I stop. Even the thought of it all is too much for me.

I had a dream where one of my children died - and just that depressed me for weeks and put me in a major funk. And it was just a dream. I can't imagine it actually happening, and as you say, I don't want to.

That's one of the negative aspects of living a long life that didn't occur to me until my grandmother, who lived to 100 told me. She said it's sad because all of her friends had died, all of her siblings, and one of her sons died.

Just a century or two ago parents would bury half of their children at a young age. The heaven is now.

That did not make it any less of a tragedy.

Depends on what you mean. The past is a different country; they do things differently there. Judging attitudes of the ancients from our current situation may lead to self-deception.

At least some people grow callous in face of ubiquitous dangers. Otherwise people would not be able to fight in wars or survive in pre-modern cities where mortality from diseases now considered banal was actually comparable to a constant low-intensity war.

A lot of ancient societies did not even consider infants as people until they reached certain age, precisely because their chance of death was too high. If you experience something 7 or 10 times and most other people around you do as well, you will get used to it. We are just built that way. It sounds horrible to a modern person and may attract some downvotes, but premature death was omnipresent and, as such, probably less of a tragedy than today.

Looking at the old folk songs etc., their lyrics often do mention happy/unhappy love, or complicated relations with parents or the nobility, but rarely deaths in the family. If someone's death is mentioned in a folk song, it is often a young soldier - a valuable person (strong, suitable for agricultural tasks) whose life was unnecessarily wasted.

Plus, the societies back then were way more religious than today, and eternal life was considered a given. This is yet another thing we mostly cannot fathom today, especially hard-core engineering skeptics here on the HN, but people in the past really did believe their own religion and it helped them with their grief.

My grandmother lost a child, an aunt that had serious issues (Down syndrome) that died when she was still quite young. In spite of the other 9 kids that she had this was the one that was most on her mind and I doubt she ever really got over it.

I know a few other stories like that, from that same era, ~ 100 years ago now. And I do not know any counterexamples that showed people took the loss of a child less serious back then, or that it was less of a tragedy. I can't look back further into history from first hand. But 100 years ago the feelings seemed to be much the same that they are today.

Chances are that further back in the past that you were right and that had different attitudes but that may have to be much further back.

I was thinking of a more distant past, like prior to 1700 or 1800 in the West, when 8 kids dying young and 2 surviving into adulthood was an unsurprising count. It must have felt normal in Constantinople or Rome.

I think it works both ways. Some day in the future, ordinary people won't believe how we, inhabitants of the early 21st century, would just somehow psychologically accept dying before turning 120.

Ok, that makes it indeed much more common. And the plague years were especially bad in that respect, whole villages wiped out.

I'm not sure about living to 120, if you could do it with body and mind of a 45 year old I'd say bring it on but otherwise I think I'd pass.

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