Feeling desperately anxious about what to say to a friend whose child had died, I asked another friend who is a guidance counsellor for advice.
“Well,” she said drily, “if you find any sentence beginning with ‘at least’ forming in your mind, you should certainly reconsider uttering it.”
When I looked puzzled, she supplied: “At least he isn’t suffering any more. At least you have other children. At least you have your faith. At least you have each other. At least you have all those beautiful memories of his last weeks.”
She was only warming up. “And don’t say he is in a better place. Do you think any parent wants to believe that any place is better than with them? Or that time heals. It doesn’t. Time just passes. It doesn’t heal.”
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By this stage, I was frantically and guiltily trying to remember if I had ever said anything remotely similar and worrying that my question had inadvertently reopened old wounds in my adviser.
Somewhat defensively, I asked what I should say instead. Her answer was weary and has remained with me. “Mostly nothing. Try listening instead. And use his name.”
Short, simple advice and so, so hard to follow. Even if you have never met an individual and do not know the family, hearing about the death of a child or a young adult causes a reflexive shiver and an involuntary warding against such a tragedy.
Left reeling
This week, the country has been reeling from the deaths of four young people. One death was a tragic crash in a high-risk sport that Jack de Bromhead loved. The other three, of siblings Lisa Cash, and Chelsea and Christy Cawley, were brutal killings.
The relative rarity of a child’s death makes the blow even more shattering. It does not help at all that the phenomenon of children mostly surviving childhood is relatively recent.
In Dublin in 1916, of every 1,000 children who were born, 153 would not survive to 12 months. In the same year, one in five deaths across the country occurred in a child under 15 years of age.
in 2021 the infant mortality rate was 3.1 per 1,000, while four-fifths of deaths were in those over 65 years old. Families today are smaller, too.
It was not that families did not grieve when children died in large families in the past, but survival was not taken for granted in the way that it is now. Death was a familiar visitor in all age groups, including the young.
No matter how common death at a young age was once, it still took its toll. In the musical Hamilton, Lin-Manuel Miranda powerfully portrays the impact of the death of Alexander Hamilton’s cherished son, Philip, on the founding father.
When Philip died aged 19 in 1801 in an ill-advised duel, the elder Hamilton was so distraught he could barely stand.
Lin-Manuel Miranda’s lyrics talk about the Hamiltons “going through the unimaginable”. The most acute insight, however, is in the lines: “We push away what we can never understand/We push away the unimaginable.’ Our problem is that we can imagine it too vividly, and instinctively want to shy away.
Even Jesus shed tears
It is tempting to think that the more prevalent religious faith of previous generations offered some kind of protection against the grief someone might experience today. Faith, however, while it can ultimately provide some sense of meaning, offers little protection against the rawness of grief, particularly the death of a child. After all, even Jesus shed tears at the tomb of his friend.
C.S. Lewis captures this in A Grief Observed. “Don’t come talking to me about the consolations of religion or I shall suspect that you don’t understand.”
Lewis is a comfort to many readers because his grief after the death of his wife, Joy Davidman, whom he met relatively late in life, is expressed in raw, unfiltered but eloquent ways. He eventually comes to acceptance, seeing bereavement as another stage of love.
His meticulous record of his own journey through grief also illustrates for us that grief is as individual as a fingerprint. Trying to enforce a timetable does violence to the process.
There is a modern notion, sadly now enshrined in the prestigious Diagnostic and Statistical Manual of Mental Disorders (DSM-5-TR), that grief is prolonged and complicated if it persists beyond a year in adults and six months in children and adolescents.
What nonsense. Grief can ambush you 20 years later. Complicated grief, where the person cannot recover in any meaningful sense, is real and needs professional help, but imposing a timetable as short as a year on everyone is arbitrary and even damaging.
Grief is the price we pay for love but we should not have to pay it alone. Covid-19 restrictions reinforced the importance of funerals and presence at funerals.
My friend the guidance counsellor was right. Often the best thing to do is to say very little, and do the practical things that the grieving people need us to do for them. But patient, listening presence long after the funeral is over may be even more important.