Why the Death of a Child is Unique Among Losses

The Death of a Child is Unique

When Ruby Cooper was 16 years old, she gave birth to twins, and she told this story as part of The Moth Radio Hour podcast, https://themoth.org/stories/giving-and-receiving. One baby died at birth and the other was a boy later diagnosed with cerebral palsy. In was 1960, and her son’s doctor recommended that Ruby place her son in an institution so that he could be “with his kind.”

Ruby responded that she was his mother and thus “his kind,” and she would raise him herself. Overwhelmed with the responsibility of raising a son with special needs, she told her mother that she didn’t know what to do. Her mother responded, “We don’t love him because of what he can or can’t do. We love him because he is ours.” And that is what they did.

Ruby outlived her son who lived a full life and died in his 40s.

Death of a Child is Unfair

We do love people because they are ours even when we are unsure how living that love should look. And we love them as they are even when, or if, we might hope that circumstances were different. But almost always if we are witnesses to their death, we wish they had more time and we had more time with them. And perhaps no group knows this better or feels this more deeply than parents who experience the death of a child.

When talking with new-grad nurses at the pediatric hospital where I work, we talk about when children die. I ask them what is different about a child’s death compared to an adult death. How is the death of an 8-day-old or an 8-year-old different than the death of an 80-year-old? And it’s important to acknowledge that all are sad and leave those left behind with wanting more time.

The new-grad nurses and most people I know think there are differences between a child’s death and the death of an older person. There is an issue of fairness. The older person had the opportunity to make the best they could of life over many years. The child deserved many years, too. There is sometimes the comfort at the end of a long life that there are seasons for being born, growing, living, and dying. Perhaps the “circle of life.” But a child’s death comes too quickly. Bereaved father Gordon Livingston titled the memoir of his son’s brief life appropriately “only spring.”

Survivors Left with Many Questions

When a child dies before the parent, at any age, really, there is a feeling of being “out of order.” As many bereaved parents have commented, children are supposed to bury parents, parents are not supposed to bury children. For the surviving parent, how can the death of their child ever feel anything but wrong?

So, I would suggest that we concede a few things:

When anyone we love dies, almost always, we wish they had more time be that more minutes, hours, days, or years.

The younger the person, the more life and their death can feel unfair.

While we are, almost always, left with questions of why, mostly there are no good answers to be found. As bereaved father Nicholas Wolterstorff writes, to live without answers is “precarious” and our “net of meaning is too small.”

There are no good words to say to make sense of it all or to take away the pain.

All of the above is true, and there is more.

Short Lives have Great Value

The instrument has yet to be devised that comes close to measuring the worth of a single life. The value of a life, no matter how brief, is beyond measure.

There is a wholeness in a life because it is a life. It is not less whole because it is limited by quantity or quality. No single life, however notable, includes every possible human experience. We are all limited and yet can all be whole. Our lives can be whole even when we leave things undone and potential unfulfilled because this is fundamental to who we are, to being human. We are mortal and we are limited no matter how long our lives may be. In this way, in nature we are all the same.

In Tom Stoppard’s play, The Cost of Utopia, he has his character, again a bereaved father, say these words: Because children grow up, we think that a child’s purpose is to grow up. But a child’s purpose is to be a child. Nature doesn’t disdain what only lives for a day. It pours the whole of itself into each moment…

In the beautiful children’s book, Lifetimes, it is explained this way: There is a beginning and an ending for everything that is alive. In between is living…So, no matter how long they are, or how short, lifetimes are really all the same. They have beginnings, and endings, and there is living in between.

Every Life is Whole

There are limitations worthy of grief in every life no matter how brief or long because life is always limited. Every life can also be considered whole.

That’s because every life has unmeasurable value. Every life has meaning. Every life has its own wholeness.

These hard-won insights offer some comfort even as they do not erase the pain we feel when a life ends too soon.

For we bereaved parents, perhaps writer and parent Andrew Solomon says it as well as anyone…

Most of us believe that our children are the children we had to have; we could have had no others. They will never seem to us to be happenstance; we love them because they are our destiny. Even when they are flawed, do wrong, hurt us, die—even then, they are part of the rightness by which we measure our own lives. Indeed, they are the rightness by which we measure life itself, and they bring us to life as profoundly as we do them.

And bereaved mother, Ebony Cobin, speaks for so many of the bereaved, especially parents, as she writes of the much too short life of her daughter, Madison: “There’s not a day that goes by that I don’t think about the life I had. If it was an option, I’d do it over and over again.”

Reach Greg Adams at the Center for Good Mourning: www.archildrens.org

Read more from Greg Adams: Hope is a Muscle – Open to Hope

Greg Adams

Greg Adams is a social worker at Arkansas Children's Hospital (ACH) where he coordinates the Center for Good Mourning, a grief support and outreach program, and works with bereavement support for staff who are exposed to suffering and loss. His past experience at ACH includes ten years in pediatric oncology and 9 years in pediatric palliative care. He has written for and edited The Mourning News, an electronic grief/loss newsletter, since its beginning in 2004. Greg is also an adjunct professor in the University of Arkansas-Little Rock Graduate School of Social Work where he teaches a grief/loss elective and students are told that while the class is elective, grief and loss are not. In 1985, Greg graduated from Baylor University majoring in social work and religion, and he earned a Masters in Social Work from the University of Missouri in 1986. One answer to the question of how he got into the work of grief and death education is that his father was an educator and his mother grew up in the residence part of a funeral home where her father was a funeral director. After growing up in a couple small towns in Missouri south of St. Louis, Greg has lived in Little Rock since 1987. He married a Little Rock native in 1986 and his wife is an early childhood special educator and consultant. Together they have two adult children. Along with his experience in the hospital with death and dying and with working with grieving people of all ages, personal experiences with death and loss have been very impacting and influential. In 1988, Greg’s father-in-law died of an unexpected suicide. In 1996, Greg and his wife lost a child in mid-pregnancy to anencephaly (no brain developed). Greg’s mother died on hospice with cancer in 2008 and his father died after the family decided to stop the ventilator after a devastating episode of sepsis and pneumonia in 2015. Greg has a variety of interests and activities—including slow running, reading, sports, public education, religion, politics, and diversity issues—and is active in his church and community. He is honored to have the opportunity to be a contributor for Open to Hope.